


Unequivocal

by stereomer



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-31 23:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereomer/pseuds/stereomer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how it would have happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. in a hail of bullets

 

 

 

**in a hail of bullets**  
  
  
  


> _So, how did you all meet?_  
>   
>  Mikey was working for Eyeball records and um, I was in this band, Pencey Prep. We knew each other through the label, he’d come out and support us a lot. They started the band before I joined, actually – it was him, Ray, Gerard, and Matt. Then when Pencey broke up, they asked me if I wanted to play, and I was just so psyched about that because they were my favorite band.

  


*

  
“Mikey!”  
  
Frank pushes his way through the crowd, holding his cup and his cigarette above his head and yelling Mikey's name again. And again. Three more times. He finally scoots in by Mikey's side, shoulder-first, bumping into a thin, untanned arm. Mikey tucks it into his chest at the contact and blinks at Frank before smiling pleasantly. He's wearing an ill-fitting shirt that pinches up in peaks over his shoulders while the hem takes refuge slightly above his hips. His glasses have oily smudges that distort his eyes a little. His hair looks like a birdhouse.  
  
Mikey Way, everyone.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
“Fucking deaf, I swear to god,” Frank says over the noise, tilting his chin up so that he won't have to repeat himself. “I called your name like, eighty times.”  
  
Mikey nods. “It's all those evil Pencey Prep shows I've been going to. The perils of being a fan, dude, I'm about to be blind and deaf. Thanks, really.”  
  
“Shut up,” is all Frank manages to come back with, but he's about four drinks ahead of Mikey, so whatever. He goes to take a drag off his cigarette, fakes himself out as he forgets which hand is holding which, and then finally opts to take a sip of beer instead. “What are you doing later?”  
  
Mikey shrugs. He abruptly turns his head as he watches the progress of some blonde chick through the kitchen.  
  
“I asked 'what', not 'who',” Frank yells.  
  
“Ha, ha,” Mikey says dryly. “I don't know, we might hang out with Geoff later, or I think there might be something going on downtown near that old bakery - ” He stops talking and looks over when someone with a hood over their head taps him on the arm.  
  
“Oh, hey. Frank, this is my brother, Gerard. Gerard, Frank.”  
  
“What's up,” Frank greets. He squints. All he can see of Gerard's face is one eye, stringy black hair, and a chin that kind of blends into the neck.  
  
“Hey.” Gerard smiles, quick and tight. He turns back to Mikey and says, “I'm gonna take off now. Did you need me to pick you up?”  
  
“Nah, I'll probably crash on someone's couch.”  
  
“You should stay,” Frank says, only because Mikey doesn't. Mikey smiles when Gerard shifts uncomfortably and says, “Oh, uh. Thanks, but maybe next time.”  
  
“Wait, wait, here.” Frank hurriedly sticks his cigarette between his lips to free up a hand and takes out the box of Reds from his pocket. “At least have a cigarette.” Because Frank offers lots of things when he's drunk - which is potentially a very dangerous habit to have - and he also feels bad really fucking easily for no reason at all. He rattles the box until Gerard gingerly reaches in and plucks one out.  
  
“Thanks,” he says again. He raises his eyebrows as he holds the cigarette up, then waves to them and turns to walk toward the front door with hunched shoulders and hands shoved into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie.  
  
“Nice try,” Mikey snorts. He too takes a cigarette from the box that Frank's still holding out and lights it with matches produced from somewhere within his impossibly tight pants. “I've tried about a hundred times to get him to stay at one of these things.”  
  
“And that means I've tried a hundred and one,” Frank states solemnly.  
  
“Yeah, he’s kind of antisocial.”  
  
“Brooding,” Frank adds. He watches Gerard disappear into the dark of the street. He laughs and changes tack. “So, how's the job going?”  
  
“Good. I mean whatever, you can only stock so many books before you start getting bored, you know?” Mikey even looks bored as he talks about it.  
  
“I meant the Eyeball job, man,” Frank snickers. “Why the hell would I ask how the other one is going? I know it sucks.”  
  
“Well, that one really is going well.” Mikey breathes out a stream of smoke and brightens. “Dude, did I tell you that we're starting a band?”  
  
“Yeah? Finally using the label to your advantages, huh?” Frank ducks away, but Mikey doesn’t try to punch him or anything.  
  
“Shut up. No really though, we got people to play in it and everything.” It isn’t until Mikey keeps with the subject that Frank actually believes him. He’s genuinely interested now, mostly because Mikey’s always seemed like one of those guys who were just content on staying in the background, sidling back and forth between backstage and the bar. The last time Frank saw him mess around on a bass, he was concentrating so hard on the fretboard that it looked like he was trying to will the bass to play itself through the power of telekenesis or something.  
  
“So who with?” he asks, squinting and blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth.  
  
“Gerard, and this guy, Ray, and Otter - you met him last time, I think. It's gonna be fucking awesome. I already thought of a name for us.” Mikey pauses dramatically, as if to give Frank a chance to guess.  
  
“Just tell me, you loser,” Frank grins. It’s weird seeing Mikey so hyped up about something for once in his life. His grin only widens when Mikey talks and holds his hands out to demonstrate the glory of his vision while his cigarette pokes out from between his fingers.  
  
  


*

  
So it was going to be My Chemical Romance. Frank remembers thinking,  _shit. Shit, that’s good. Fuck literary allusions, that’s_ good. He’d offered up their practice space for use, as usual talking before his mind caught up with his mouth – his rather drunken mouth at that time - but the way Mikey had smiled made Frank smile too, and Jesus, he was a sap for all things band-related. Apparently, they’d immediately taken advantage of the space, because the Attic Demos – so called because they’d been recorded in an attic, ha ha – had found their way into Frank’s hands about two weeks after My Chem had been formed.  
  
“What the hell?” was what Frank had said, because they were really on top of their shit if they had recorded songs after only two weeks. The first three months of Pencey Prep had them sitting around the practice space after plugging in the instruments and then getting high. Probably only 75% of the band was accounted for at every practice until they finally decided to get to work and actually try to accomplish things.  
  
“It sounds like ass,” Mikey had reassured him. “But you said you wanted to hear it. Bet you didn’t expect it so soon, huh?”  
  
Frank had just repeated, “What the hell?” Then he’d listened to the tape on the way home. It did sound like ass, Mikey had been right about that, but there was this underlying current of potential, and that was all Frank could hear from that moment on.  
  
Definitely a sap for all things band-related.  
  
Which would explain why on a Friday evening, instead of getting bombed before midnight at a pre-party before going out, he was sitting outside in a dark parking lot at the back end of some rundown community teen center and trying to convince Mikey and Gerard that their first show wouldn’t suck.  
  
“I can’t do this,” Mikey mutters.  
  
“You can do this,” Frank counters.  
  
There’s a pause, and then: “I can’t do this,” Mikey mutters again. They’re meaningless words now, seeing as how he’s been uttering the same phrase over and over for the past twenty minutes. He tightens his grip on his beer, enough to cause a crinkling noise and several dents in the can.  
  
“No, you can do this,” Frank repeats. These too are meaningless words. He decides to expound on them this time – their set’s supposed to start in five minutes. “Seriously, Mikes. It’s going to be fine. You guys sounded great every single time I’ve been over to hear you play. I mean, yeah, the demos sounded like shit,” he catches John’s warning glance, “but they’re demos and they’re supposed to sound like shit. Besides, you’ve improved so much since then. Really. I’m not lying. I would totally tell you if you sucked.”  
  
There's another warning glance from John, so Frank pats Mikey’s knee instead of talking; John does the same for Gerard, over on the other end of their little row of bodies crammed into the backseat of Pencey’s van. Mikey just stares into the back of the seat. Frank pats his knee again. He wonders what other sort of physical reassurance is an option to convey cool, manly encouragement.  
  
“Right. No, yeah. ‘kay,” Mikey finally mutters to himself. He nudges Gerard.  
  
Frank’s used to Mikey being monosyllabically nonsensical when drunk. He claps enthusiastically, like a fucking cheerleader, when Mikey and Gerard finally down their beers and duck their way out of the van. John and Frank follow, exchanging an uncertain look as they trail the brothers.  
  
Gerard hangs back at the entrance to hold the door open for them, and Frank quickens his pace to catch it. “Thanks,” he says, and Gerard gives him a small smile.  
  
“Thanks yourself. For dealing with all that back there,” Gerard says, speaking for the first time since Frank got to the venue. “This is doing some crazy shit to my nerves, man.”  
  
Frank wants to tell him that  _yo, no pressure, but almost all of it depends on you_. Try as he might, he can’t even begin to imagine Gerard being capable of leading a crowd – this Gerard, anyway, the one who spends his days in a basement drawing dragons or whatever while drinking pots of coffee, and shies away from most people he meets after the initial introduction. Frank hopes he’ll be proven incredibly wrong within the next few minutes.  
  
“No problem,” he finally replies. “Kill it.”  
  
Gerard disappears into the wings. Frank and John make their way over to the front of the stage, where most of the kids are standing with their arms crossed over their chest, waiting for the band to give them something to move for. There’s a buzz of feedback as Ray plugs in his guitar; Gerard is just a blob of shadows in the middle of the stage, both hands grasping the microphone and his face angled downward as he stares at the floor.  
  
“Fuck,” Frank mutters. Beside him, John shakes his head, but then a strange change seems to come over the venue. Someone plugs in Gerard’s mic and his breathing becomes amplified for a few exhales before he looks up and says, “Let’s go,” in a steady voice. The first chords crash in with the toms, and then the bass drum takes over the floor beneath Frank’s feet and he’s moving almost before he knows it, pushing the crowd and being pushed back as he looks up at the ceiling in relief as much as awe because – he lets the sound soak into his ears for a split second longer, just to make sure he’s not dreaming it – they sound fucking  _great_.  
  
“Jesus, are you seeing this?” John yells into his ear, having found his way back through the waves of bodies in the crowd.  
  
“Are  _you_  fucking seeing this?” Frank yells back. He gestures to the crowd, to everyone surging along with the music.  
  
“No, I mean – dude, look at  _Gerard_.” John points toward the stage. Frank still can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing, and he can’t bring himself to find out. There’s sweat dripping off his chin by the time the breakdown kicks in, and they’re on their second song before he finally allows himself to look.  
  
“Jesus,” Frank echoes John at the sight, but more to himself than anything. The crowd pushes in front of him as he pauses and soon there are at least ten heads in the way of his view. He makes his way to the back of the room and drags out one of the chairs that are stacked up against the walls. It’s a little rickety under his feet, but he can see the whole stage now and finds himself smiling hugely as he watches them play; as he watches Gerard sing.  
  
  


*

  
“ - My. Chemical. Romance,” Frank yells over Toro's crazy soloing. The person next to him leans closer and bellows, “Who?!”  
  
Frank just waves him off this time and they both go back to nodding along with the music. Even after having seen them pretty regularly by now, he still wants to laugh at Mikey's sullen expression. Otter sounds pretty solid, Ray's about to light his guitar on fire if he plays any faster, and Gerard -  
  
Christ. Mic-swinging, sweaty, spitting, screaming Gerard. He's more manic than Frank ever gave him credit for. To think that this person was the same guy he'd met a few months ago with the antisocial hunched posture and 7/8ths of his face covered by a hoodie – it's interesting, is the simplest way to put it. Being in Pencey is something he misses all the time, but being a singer is something he only misses when he sees Gerard performing. He still can’t get over it. Every single gig seems like the first time he’s seeing Gerard like this, like he’s being fucking reborn or some shit.  
  
Gerard would probably put it that way too, Frank thinks with a grin. Geeky motherfucker. They’ve been hanging out more often, since Frank has taken to practically stalking them at their practices, even more so after Pencey’s death, and yeah. Geeky motherfucker, basically.  
  
Before he knows it, the last chord to 'Skylines' is being reduced to feedback through the monitors as Gerard mumbles something into the mic, already retreating back into his offstage self. Amidst clapping and a few cheers, they all place their instruments onto the stands with caution and a certain sense of awkwardness on their way off. Everything's now at a pace that marks the definite ending of a show, kind of like fireworks reduced to a handful of ashes in the sky, and that feeling always makes Frank a little depressed - the fact that all of it has to be over at some point, when the only thing he wants is to just scream into the mic and keep that break from ordinary.  
  
He swallows down several gulps of his beer to stop the wave of regrets about Pencey and all the shit surrounding it. He’d mourned it way more than enough; school was occupying most of his time for now, which he was fine with. Kind of. The thing that gnawed at him most was that they’d gotten close, they really had. They had even made it a little – not in the strictest terms of ‘we made it!’, but pretty fucking close. But that wasn’t even the point. Point was, he missed playing, plain and simple.  
  
He downs the rest of the drink.  
  
Matt high-fives him as he’s making a beeline for the bar with Gerard on his tail. Gerard flashes a smile at Frank as he passes and Frank nods back.  
  
“Stalker,” says Mikey's voice from behind him. Frank turns and grins.  
  
“Repayment for all the Pencey shows you came to. It's not like you guys are actually good or anything.” He smiles more when Mikey calls him an asshole. “Hey, so when are you recording? That's really happening, right?”  
  
”Yeah. Yeah, we actually got Geoff to produce it.”  
  
Frank is impressed yet again. He’d tried to train himself not to react anymore to the rate at which My Chem were getting things done, but it hadn’t worked. “No shit? What the hell did you put in his drink?”  
  
“Ha ha.” Mikey rolls his eyes. He glances over to the other guys.  
  
“So are roofies expensive or what?” Frank presses, just for kicks. Mikey’s an easy target. Sometimes Frank almost feels bad.  
  
“I’m bored with this,” Mikey says in monotone.  
  
Frank steps forward and bumps his shoulder against Mikey’s arm. “I’m kidding. You’re too easy.”  
  
“’Cause I make it easy. On purpose. Anyway, but, um. About recording.  Major problem before we can even start.” Mikey clears his throat. “We need another guitarist.”  
  
“Oh dude, that sucks,” Frank says half-heartedly. It did suck. It meant calling people, which meant time, which meant money, which was something that nobody he knew had.  
  
“Ye-eah.” Mikey drags the word, pushing his lower jaw out and making a generally annoying noise with his vowels. “Okay,” he adds abruptly. “What if that other guitarist was you?” He winces as he says this, like he's asking for an impossible favor.  
  
“The other guitarist?” Frank asks dumbly.  
  
Mikey gives him a weird look. “Yeah. The other guitarist. You.”  
  
Frank takes this in. After a pause, he says, in a calm voice, “If you're kidding, I'm going to break your arms.”  
  
He's thought about it, lots of times, definitely as a daydream thing while punching his way through a never-ending list of phone numbers and offering their owners free credit consolidation. He thought about it when Pencey broke up. When he formed bands post-Pencey. When the post-Pencey bands broke up. Yesterday. Four minutes ago.  
  
 “I'm serious,” Mikey insists. “ _We're_ serious. Ray said he thinks a rhythm guitar will flesh things out or whatever. Short of a machine that can clone Ray or something, we really need a second guitar, even I can hear that.”  
  
“Dude.” Frank finally allows himself to get a little excited. ”Yeah. I mean, if everyone else is cool with it. That'd be fucking - that'd be fucking awesome, man, thanks.” This is big. This is huge. He’s never been able to stop from getting ahead of himself and now he's already thinking about double-tracking a background progression on some of their songs -  
  
“All right. Of course everyone’s cool with it. We even had a band meeting and everything.” Mikey smiles. “Cool. Okay, well, we're recording in three days.”  
  
“Three – ”  
  
“This is gonna be great.” Mikey turns to the side to buy a drink of his own.  
  
Frank's fingers twitch.  
  
  


*

  


> _And then you started recording right away?_  
>   
>  Yup, pretty much. Mikey actually convinced Geoff – Rickly, from Thursday – to produce, which was awesome. Everything happened really fast; we were a band for about, six months I think? Yeah, six months before we made the album. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘they’, because they asked me to join about a week before going into the studio.

  


*

  
Ray had slapped him with basic chord progressions scribbled onto a Carl’s Jr. bag, “not that, you know, I’m doubting your knowledge of the songs or whatever, but I just wanted you to have something concrete to work off of,” he explained when he’d handed the bag to Frank almost apologetically. “It’s really awesome that you’re with us now, though.”  
  
Frank had told him thanks and then to fuck off and not to worry about it because it’s exactly what he needed, before clambering into the van and trying to pull out a lead line from the map of frets in his head without succumbing to the refuge of the heated studio.  
  
He balances the bag on his knee now, trying to decipher the hasty tabs he’d written not ten minutes ago. “Turn up the treble a little bit.” Frank points his index finger toward the ceiling and talks around the guitar pick pressed between his lips. “Little more. Yeah.” He gives his guitar an experimental strum, a G Major chord played one string at a time; the amp responds accordingly.  
  
“You good?” Geoff asks with a hand on the knob, ready to shut the door. He does so when Frank nods while clamping the headphones onto his ears. Gerard and Mikey are in the lounge on the other side of the glass while Ray and Matt are taking naps in the van (the van having successfully passed a smell inspection by the three of them after Matt had thrown up in it the week before). Mikey is slowly chewing on a Twix and examining the caramel in the bar with a frown, as if he's never seen anything like it before in his life.  
  
The click track brings him back to the moment and he quickly positions his fingers over the fretboard right before the song kicks in, just a bare drum and bass track for now. Frank's found that it's much easier to record if he's zoning out, and so he focuses absently on Gerard. Gerard is slumped on the couch, a notebook obscuring most of his face, but Frank can still see the slightly greasy bits of flyaway hair peeking up over the white pages and the hand that's resting on his stomach, closing and opening almost compulsively: fist, open hand, fist,  _Star Trek_  sign.  
  
Gerard - Gerard was actually pretty cool. He got so  _into_  whatever he talked about, was the thing. Frank thought that was probably one of the best things about him. And also, Frank could make fun of him for being a fucking nerd and he’d take it well, smiling quietly and turning back to reading the latest Neil Gaiman work. He probably took it well because Frank was a nerd too, and would turn back to reading up on the latest issue of the  _Avengers_.  
  
There’s just something. Frank can’t put his finger on it. All he knows is that whenever it came down to taking someone out for a quick, covert drink during breaks, he’d always choose Gerard and that was that.  
  
Almost before he realizes it, the song's fading out and he becomes conscious of the fact that Gerard, now with a pen in his hand, is staring back at him with a slightly amused quirk to his mouth. Frank smiles and laughs a little; he doesn't know if he's embarrassed for getting caught or for staring in the first place. But the feeling dissipates when Gerard turns his notebook around, revealing a messy sketch of Frank. Ink-Frank stares straight out from the paper with the same expression that Gerard has now. Ink-Frank has a chunk of hair identical to the one that sticks up from the crown of Frank's head, the one that he's constantly tugging on.  
  
“One more time,” Geoff says, voice crackling over the two-way.  
  
Frank sniffs quickly. “Right.” He grips the guitar neck. Gerard flips his notebook back, and it’s time for another take.  
  
It isn’t a lot of work for him, since there’s no time for Ray to teach him all the guitar parts; it’d be way easier if he just lays them down himself for now. After only three days, there isn’t really much of anything to do but plain not showing up would be a total dick move on his part, so over the next few weeks, Frank spends most of his time in the background, observing them and studying Ray’s playing, taking mental notes. He sits on the couch and watches them record one at a time. He eats all their food. He leans against doorframes as they discuss song structures. He sleeps.  
  
“Hardest working guitarist this side of the Atlantic,” says Gerard’s voice. Frank opens his eyes and sees Gerard leaning over him.  
  
“Don’t I know it,” Frank mumbles. He crosses his arms tighter over his chest, tucking his hand more securely against his ribcage.  
  
Gerard says, “Scootch,” but he sits down on Frank anyway. Once you got past the antisocialness and the tendency to clam up around people, Gerard was surprisingly open to invading all personal space.  
  
“Hmmmpfff,” Frank chokes at the pressure on his stomach.  
  
“Christ, Gerard, you’re going to squish the kid and we’re going to be out another guitarist after we just got him,” Matt comments as he strolls into the room.  
  
Frank slaps at Gerard, who leans back against the couch and feigns nonchalance for a good ten seconds before sliding off him and onto the edge of the cushions. The scent of cigarettes is coming off him in waves; it fills Frank’s head when he takes a few deep breaths. He grabs Gerard’s arm and sniffs the cuff of his sweater to make sure of it.  
  
“You fuel the addiction,” he says, letting Gerard go. Gerard smells his fingers in response, frowning at the smell of stale tobacco.  
  
Frank knocks at his elbow with a loose fist. “Quit being weird and go get me a beer, dick.”  
  
“Trading in one addiction for another?” Gerard grins. But he gets up and goes to the minifridge to pull out two cans of beer. He makes like he’s going to toss one over, but instead ambles back over to the couch and hands it to Frank.  
  
“Never said I was an all-star thrower,” Gerard says with a shrug. Both of them pop open their beers with twin  _hiss-cracks_. Frank sits up just enough to not dribble beer all over his face, and he’s swallowing when he sees Gerard wince.  
  
“What’s up?”  
  
Gerard touches his fingers to his cheek, pressing down gingerly. “Dunno. That fucking toothache again. Gets worse when I drink cold stuff.”  
  
“Swallowing down too much jizz gives you cavities, Gee, didn’t you know,” Matt declares as Mikey emerges from the recording booth. “Hold off on the cocksucking until we’re done, okay? We’re almost there, man, I know you can do it.”  
  
“Oh god, I don’t even want to know,” Mikey grimaces.  
  
“Fuck off, Matt,” says Gerard, still wincing.  
  
John asks, “You ready to go, Gerard?” while staring down at the soundboard and sliding up the volume on a few tracks. He looks up when there’s no reply.  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, just give me a sec.” Gerard takes another gulp of his drink and then sets it down on the carpet before following Geoff into the recording booth. Frank watches as Geoff explains something to Gerard, something that requires lots of waving arms and throat-touching and pointing up toward the ceiling. Gerard listens intently, nodding and pushing his hair back behind his ears. It falls back into his face anyway, and Frank laughs to himself.  
  
He doesn’t realize he’s zoning out again until Matt taps him on the arm. “Cigarette?”  
  
“What?” Frank blinks at him, a little startled. “Oh, yeah. Sure.” He swings himself off the couch and follows Matt outside after sneaking a last glance at the booth.  
  
“Last few songs,” Matt comments over his shoulder as he pushes open the back entrance door. It’s a cloudless day, the air clear and a cutting kind of cold. Their breaths puff out their noses in white curls, roiling and dissipating out as Matt lights one up.  
  
“I know, it’s crazy.” Frank squints against the sun and murmurs a thanks when Matt holds out his light and flicks open the flame. He inhales as his cigarette catches. “I think it’s going to be awesome.”  
  
“Yeah? I fucking hope so.”  
  
“Yeah, man. I have this,” Frank presses his free hand to his chest and sort of fans it back and forth in front of him, “this weird feeling about it.”  
  
“I bet that’s what you say every time,” Matt teases.  
  
Frank laughs. “Yeah. All two times. But seriously. I’ve just got this weird feeling.” He shakes his head.  
  
“You’re a hopeful one, Iero.” Matt tilts his head back and talks while looking up at the sky. “I’m just hoping you’re right.”  
  
  


*

  
  
Geoff calls them while they’re at practice, insisting on something being a surprise until Gerard wears him down by asking, “Well, what the fuck is it?” repeatedly. He finally hangs up after almost ten minutes of it with a wide grin on his face. Frank assumes that Geoff had broken.  
  
“What is it?” he echoes.  
  
“The album. It’s done,” Gerard says gleefully. “They want us to come into the studio and listen to it.”  
  
Everyone immediately puts down their instrument and runs for the van. Mikey ends up as the driver, weaving in and out between lanes and navigating downtown like a fucking rabid cabbie, and Frank realizes that maybe this is the reason why Geoff wanted to keep mum until they actually got there. When they screech into side parking – Mikey gets it on one try without even having to reverse or anything – Geoff is already holding the door open, squinting at them with a hand shading his eyes.  
  
“You impatient little pricks,” he calls out as they emerge from the van in a jumble.  
  
“You were treating us like five year olds!” Gerard grins back. “Like, ‘hey, want a surprise?’ I felt like you were going to give us a fucking pony.”  
  
“This is the thanks I get for making an album, huh?” Geoff says. They file in, Gerard last, and Geoff gives him a hug as he lets go of the door. “Hey, I’m proud of you guys, I really am.” He shakes his head when they all make cooing noises in response.  
  
“All right, and you’re back to being impatient little pricks,” he says. He pushes open the door to the lounge, where Alex and John are already waiting.  
  
“I’m surprised you guys didn’t kill yourselves on the way over here. That was what, a twenty-five minute drive cut down to ten?” Alex smirks at them as they pile onto the couch.  
  
“Cut the crap and start the music,” Mikey quips goofily. He ducks out of the way of Alex’s half-hearted fist. “Dude, you already hit one of the Ways, let’s leave it at that.”  
  
“I see now that I should have gone for the younger, dumber brother,” Alex says. He turns to Gerard. “Sorry about that again, man.”  
  
Gerard grins. “Cut the crap and start the music.”  
  
“Okay, okay.” Alex turns to the soundboard and presses some buttons. There’s a noise of the CD player whirring and changing, and then a static-covered 40s radio effect fills the studio. Everyone sits silently until the track segues into the diminished guitar lick. The room fills with basses and trebles and everything in between.  
  
“Holy shit,” Matt says, barely audible over the music. His mouth remains slightly open. “Holy shit.”  
  
“I know.” Ray nods. They all stare at the speakers, as if somehow the sound will manifest itself into something tangible. “This sounds great. I mean, I’m sure we could have done some things better, or Geoff could have done things better” - and Geoff throws a single Frito at Ray’s smiling face as Mikey says, “Don’t rain on our parade, Ray” - “but, no really, this sounds great,” Ray finishes.  
  
Frank remains silent, just listening to the other guys talk as the CD plays.  _Their_  CD plays, everything sounding studio-quality but not extremely polished. It’s pretty fucking awesome. He knows the songs now, can trace out every fret that Ray presses down on. When it passes the halfway point, he glances over at Gerard, who’s sitting on the other end of the couch and cradling his jaw gently. Right as Frank is about to tap him on the leg to ask if he's okay, he looks over, smiling a little.  
  
“The ghost of an ache. But it sounds great,” he says. “Weird though, to hear myself. Even with all the playbacks.”  
  
“Yeah, it really does. Now fucking get better already so we can tour on this.”  
  
“Fuck off,” Gerard scoffs. “Let’s see you deal with having the tooth fairy come at you with a vengeance.” But he takes his hand away from his face and leans forward to grab up a few looseleaf papers and a pen from the floor. He begins to draw out rough sketches, scenes that are mostly shadows.  
  
There’s about a week left before touring – fucking  _touring_ \- is supposed to start, which is enough time to make a video for ‘Vampires’. The sketches turn into this crazy storyboard that isn’t really crazy, it’s just really detailed in the pictures. Except it’s not really all detailed, it’s just mostly black. But it involves work in order to make, so it’s crazy detailed, Frank thinks. Especially when they all show up to a back-lot a few days later where four plywood walls are set up and Gerard announces, “We gotta paint the set.”  
  
“We gotta what the what?” Frank asks.  
  
“We gotta make it look good. I don’t want us having a shitty-ass video for our first single.”  
  
Matt says, carefully, “You do realize that we have no money. And that this is going to be shot by a slightly-better-than-shitty camera from one of Ray’s friends. And that we have no money.”  
  
“Well, yeah,” Gerard concedes. “But still, it wouldn’t kill us to make an effort, would it?”  
  
“Paint fumes are deadly,” Mikey says in a solemn voice. Gerard hands him the biggest brush in response. Mikey makes a face and actually takes it, which is the funniest part. Ray once commented that maybe someone should tell Mikey that he doesn’t have to do everything his older brother says anymore, but then that would take away a lot of reasons to laugh at him, so they decided not to.  
  
The suits – the costumes – are something else entirely. Ray’s is from high school graduation and the hems of his pants hang about mid-calf. Mikey had saved his tuxedo from senior prom, Gerard had picked his up from Goodwill, Matt had lifted one from his dad, and Frank had also thrifted his.  
  
“We look fucking stupid,” Matt comments once they’ve changed.  
  
“Think shadows,” Gerard says reassuringly. “Lots of shadows.”  
  
They think shadows. Gerard directs them the entire night, even suggesting things to Ray’s friend who takes it all in stride, thankfully. The rest of them kick rocks around and act out several James Bond scenes while Gerard’s muttering to himself about lights. The sky is purple and orange with the beginnings of sunrise when Gerard finally calls it a wrap – “you’re gay,” Frank tells him – but they watch some rough shots on the small pull-out screen of the camera and staying up all night while getting woozy from paint fumes seems worth it.  
  
“We just made a video,” Mikey declares.  
  
“Fuck yeah, we did.” Frank claps him on the back.  
  
“The proverbial ball has started to roll,” Ray says, and then he cusses them all out when they call him a nerd.  
  
  


*

  


> _Have audiences been receptive so far?_  
>   
>  Definitely. Yeah, it’s crazy, I’m just so grateful to everyone that comes out to each show. The fans have been so great to us, given us a lot of support and backed us up along the way. They were there from the beginning.  
>   
>  _And everyone in the band is close, even with the whole ‘we live in a van’ thing?_  
>   
>  [ _Laughs_ ] We are, yeah. Everyone’s really close – I mean, living like that, doing that whole touring circuit in a van, it forces you to deal and eventually you come out of it closer than ever. All of us have mostly the same sort of background, both with growing up and with music, so it’s really easy to talk and shoot the shit.

  


*

They're all sleeping at the Way house tonight, planning on getting an early start in the morning. Ray had even scribbled out an itinerary and taped it to the wall by the front door. ( _6:30, wake up; 6:45, breakfast; 7:00, hit the road_ . Frank had taken one of Gerard's pens - “That's a drawing pen from Michael's, you little shit, you owe me five bucks” - and amended it to  _6:30, punch Ray; 8:00, wake up; 8:30, wake up for real; 9:00, hit the road, leave Mikey behind_ .)   
  
The clock above the fireplace is already moving its short arm toward the 2, but Frank still can't sleep. He looks over at Gerard, who'd insisted on sleeping out in the living room with Ray, Frank, and Matt; “Solidarity, man, it’s our first tour and we're a real band now,” he'd said so earnestly that Frank couldn't laugh, and of course Mikey had followed suit. A tired yellow glow pushes its way through the window and half-heartedly stripes Frank's sleeping bag and Gerard's hair.   
  
Frank can’t keep the itch down. Even though Pencey had done several tours around the tri-state area, he hadn’t ever been this excited at the prospect of basically being homeless and penniless. But then he didn’t really care about that stuff as long as they got to play to people every night. Yeah, he was a college drop-out with no backup plan, but no other choice in his life had ever felt so natural and – as fucking cheesy as it was – right.   
  
Gerard cracks an eye open and looks back at Frank.   
  
“Yo,” Frank says after a pause, a little startled. He officially sucks at being inconspicuous. Either that, or Gerard is freakishly perceptive and can hear thoughts.   
  
“Can't sleep?” Gerard asks.   
  
“Nah, I wanted to stay up and stare at your ceiling all night. It's just so  _pretty_ , you know?”   
  
Gerard snorts and rolls his eyes. “Jesus, is this what the next six months are going to be like? I'd say I'll kill you probably around the fifth week or so.”   
  
“So violent, gosh.” Frank puts on an affected voice, something you'd see in a '50s TV show about girls losing innocence and boys wearing varsity jackets. He's about to continue when Mikey moves suddenly, sniffing in his sleep. He and Gerard both fall silent and watch as Mikey kicks at a coffee table leg before rolling over onto his stomach and becoming still once again.   
  
“I'd kill you first,” Frank starts again, but this time in a whisper.   
  
Gerard smiles; in the dull light, his teeth shine a stark, glistening white. His voice is as soft as Frank’s when he responds. “Oh, yeah?”   
  
The atmosphere seems different now, as with the change that always comes when daylight and loud voices are reduced to murmuring in the dark. It holds the undertones of intimacy and makes Frank feel like he should be drunk and trying to cop a feel, just by the memories associated with it all. Lying on a bed, feeling the warm, humming heat of another person against his side; alcohol giving him liquid courage to stumble over words and propositions in the dark before quietly reaching out with his hands.   
  
“Yeah,” he challenges. He clutches the top of his sleeping bag and tries to pull it up closer to his chin. “Yeah, I got crazy ultimate fighter moves. I'll take you down. Haven't you heard?”   
  
Gerard rolls onto his side and, folding his arm under his head, looks directly at Frank, still with a small smile. “Yeah, I heard.”   
  
It's a quiet affirmation, probably only to appease Frank out of the conversation and into the last good night's sleep they're going to have for a long time, but still - the way he murmurs it, it’s like there's something more. Frank feels utterly exposed, even as he bids a “good night, fuckhead” to Gerard and turns onto his side to face Ray’s peaceful sleeping face.   
  
He closes his eyes and somehow drifts off to sleep.  It seems like five minutes pass before Ray’s nudging him awake with a foot to the chest, but when Frank opens his eyes, it’s bright outside and his is the only sleeping bag left on the carpet.   
  
“Get up, lazy,” Ray almost chirps. It’s disgusting.   
  
“You’re disgusting,” Frank croaks. He closes his eyes again.   
  
There’s an angry sizzling noise from the kitchen. “Gerard’s mom made us a bacon and pancakes breakfast,” Ray says.   
  
Frank unzips his sleeping bag and rolls out as Ray smiles triumphantly. He pads into the bathroom and squints blearily at Gerard, who’s standing in front of the sink and rinsing out his mouth.   
  
“Morning,” Gerard says, smiling brightly with the lower half of his face still dripping with water.   
  
“Jesus Christ, what is wrong with everyone,” Frank grouches. He picks up a toothbrush that’s hanging over the rim of the sink bowl. “Whose is this?”   
  
Gerard leans in front of Frank to wipe his face, mouthing out, “Mine,” around the towel.   
  
“Using it.” Frank squeezes out some toothpaste and glares at himself in the mirror as he does figure eights over his teeth.   
  
“You’re a sharer, huh,” Gerard says, but he doesn’t grimace or snatch it away. “And you’re also not a morning person, huh?”   
  
“Did my being an asshole give that away?” Frank responds thickly, dribbling out white foam onto his chin. He feels back to normal now, as sunlight occupies the spaces between them and leaves no room for whatever was there the night before.   
  
“Oh, but Frank, you’re always an asshole.” Gerard rests his chin on Frank’s shoulder as he speaks. He grins at the mirror and quickly leaves before Frank can retaliate. There’s still the ghost of a weight on his collarbone, though, and he tries to shake it off as he spits and rinses.   
  
  


*

  
The first thing Frank learns about touring is that no matter how you look at it, bad or good, it’s fucking draining. Meals usually consist of something filled with calories and sugar – candy, beer, the entire line of Hostess products – or cup noodles and anything else that can be microwaved at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Coffee is constantly on hand, even the instant stuff that tastes like piss. Subtract personal space and add a bunch of funky smells, and that’s what living in the van for months at a time has equated itself to in Frank’s mind.   
  
Generally, if any of the guys are asked how touring is on any given day at any given time, the answer is invariably one of two: “Touring sucks so hard,” or “Touring rules so hard.” And Frank admits that yeah, there are days, and then there are fucking  _days_ , when the van breaks down twice in twelve hours and he has to be the one to crawl under and check it out both times because Mikey repeatedly says Frank’s the most compact and being compact has nothing to do with being skinny, okay, and Ray, Matt, and Gerard just lean against the side of the van with smirks. Never mind the fact that Frank knows absolutely nothing about cars.   
  
“Touring fucking sucks,” Frank mutters as he lights up a cigarette with grease-coated fingers and holds it out the window as best he can because they’re the kind that only swing open about 20 degrees. He’s sitting with his back against the wall; he tucks his knees further in toward his chest, as if making himself smaller will create the illusion of more space in the van.   
  
“That’s not gonna make the van any bigger, Frankie,” Gerard comments from the backseat.   
  
“My heels are digging into my ass,” Frank says, glaring at him over the headrest, “And you’re mister king back there, lounging over your rule of the land.”   
  
Gerard laughs, that loud “Ha!” that still makes Frank jump sometimes. “Well yeah, but I did guess correctly about how many gallons of gas would go in, so fuck off. A bet’s a bet.”   
  
Frank considers this, and then blows a torrent of smoke at Gerard in response. Gerard just squints into it. It’s a quiet chunk of a drive, with Mikey listening to his CD player in shotgun, Matt driving, and Ray somehow sleeping with the upper half of his body on top of the merch boxes and the lower half bent and tucked right next to Frank’s feet. Frank digs the heel of his palm against his eyelid and tries to remember what the date is – when he fails, he tries for the day and even that falls short.   
  
But for the exhaustion that plagues them with every dragging step and jaw-cracking yawn, he knows that none of them would trade it for anything. Mikey is always saying he’s paralyzed with stage fright and yet his fingers move easily from fret to fret during the actual show. Ray complains about his solos not being clean enough but Frank can see the satisfaction on his face when he pulls notes from the guitar at crazy speeds. Matt keeps bitching about how sore his muscles are all damn day but the drums never sound the least beat softer. And Gerard, he insists he’s not cut out to be the typical frontman, but he rocks the fuck out and generally makes an ass of himself onstage.   
  
Frank looks at all the trees passing by on the edge of an interstate that he’s never seen in his life, and he couldn’t be happier about that.   
  
“Are you growing your hair out or what? Did you make that life-changing cosmetic decision yet?” Gerard asks, brushing a flat palm over the newly shorn hair on Frank’s head.   
  
Frank pretends to think about this. “Oh yes. The hair. I don’t know, long hair is so out. So ‘90s, you know what I mean?” He takes a thoughtful drag off his cigarette. “Two kinds of people have long hair: Kurt Cobain and assholes.”   
  
“You mean, Kurt Cobain and awesome people,” Gerard corrects. He swings his head from side to side so that his hair curtains one eye and then the other. Frank grins at him widely as the Batphone (a collective band phone they all share, ™ Gerard) rings up front and Matt answers.   
  
“I’m telling you,” Gerard begins again, leaning forward to faux-whisper into Frank’s ear, but then Matt holds the phone up and calls out, “Hey.”   
  
Gerard hooks his chin over the headrest and responds with a “What’s up.” His face is almost uncomfortably close to Frank’s, but then again, there is no such thing as uncomfortably close in a tour van. Frank doesn’t move, just turns his head to pay attention to Matt and not the slight tickles on his cheek as Gerard breathes. His neck tingles a little – it’s still sore from the new tattoo, which had had him a little dizzy with pain and the constant whirring noise that made it seem like the needle was going directly into his ear.   
  
(“You fucking dumbass,” Matt had said, but he’d stared at it in awe.   
  
Ray had said, “Christ, Frank, you’ve got some balls,” right as Gerard had reached out and touched it gently with two fingertips and a fascinated expression.)   
  
“That was Alex,” Matt says. He looks into the rearview mirror as he talks, and they can see the excited glint in his eyes. “Check this out. The Used want to take us on tour with them.”   
  
“What?” Frank and Gerard say, almost synchronously. Frank adds, “Wait. The Used, as in  _The Used_ ?”   
  
“If there is another band by that name, I will be pissed,” Gerard declares.   
  
“No, dude. The Used.”   
  
“Oh, man.” Frank blinks. “Oh, man, that’s. Fuck.”   
  
“Fuck yes,” Matt crows. Mikey rips off his headphones and glances between the three of them as they continue to curse and slap at whatever limb is within reach. Ray is still passed out.   
  
“Dude,” Frank gapes as Gerard leans back, laughing his maniacal laugh. “The Used are fucking big, man. They’re big.”   
  
“I know they’re big. Can you believe this shit?”   
  
“The Used?” Mikey asks, looking around at them. “What about The Used?”   
  
“We’re going to tour with them, is what.” Frank slaps at Ray’s leg as Mikey says, “Holy shit,” and keeps patting until Ray finally opens his eyes and peers at him. “Dude, we’re going on tour with The Used.”   
  
 “What?” Ray asks in a groggy voice. “Are you serious?”   
  
“Wouldn’t it be the shittiest thing ever to lie about this?” Gerard asks, leaning over the back of the seat again.   
  
“Yes, yes it would. Are you serious?”   
  
“Of course we’re serious, Ray. Unless Alex is lying to us.”   
  
“Alex is definitely not lying to us,” Matt tells him. He rolls down the driver’s side window and sticks his head out to yell in celebration.   
  
“Dude,” Frank laughs. “Touring fucking rules.”   
  
  


*

  


> _You’re known for your live shows –_
> 
> Are we really? That’s so great.
> 
> _Yeah, it’s something people have noticed. How much do you put into the show, or into playing?_
> 
> God. I fucking, I go a little crazy onstage. You’ve probably seen it, right? Yeah, I don’t know. People have told me that I turn into this manic guy, swinging his guitar everywhere and shit. I think I’ve almost killed the guys a bunch of times. I love playing, I think it’s the greatest thing to do. Even if we weren’t playing these venues, if I could just be playing to anyone anywhere, I’d be doing it.
> 
> _And what’s it like after shows?_
> 
> I think you’re trying to trick me into saying that we’re a party band! But uh, yeah, there is some partying that goes on. I mean, you have a whole bunch of guys traveling together and hanging out all the time, so alcohol is bound to come into the mix. It gets pretty crazy sometimes, but I think it’s all a part of touring life.

  


*

  
  
The Used tour is going great, save for a few times where Gerard and Bert have gone missing for the night and turned up half an hour past the start of soundcheck, with bleary eyes and stained shirts. Also not great but infinitely more hilarious is the fact that they’ve started to accidentally leave Ray at various stops all around the country. Ray takes it all in stride, though; he picks up a postcard whenever it happens and puts them all into a heavy duty Ziplock baggie that he keeps taped to the ceiling of the van.   
  
Frank is staring up at the baggie right now; a desert scene with huge block letters spelling out ARIZONA looks back down at him. Henry Rollins is yelling into his ears:  _“I hear the same old talk talk talk.”_  He’s sprawled out on his back, constantly thanking whatever higher power there is for the opportunity to stretch his legs out. Ray was sharing the backmost seat with Gerard for the time being. He adjusts his feet and can feel the ensuing squeaks of the soles of his Converses against the window. These are the white-noise moments in touring – radio silence, static, signing off until the night’s show.   
  
He turns off his CD player and tugs the headphones off his ears. Now there are only the sounds of tires against asphalt, the country clocking in numbers on their odometer. It’s nice; he crosses his arms over his chest and settles into the nothing of midday, which eventually gives way to sleep.   
  
When he wakes up, it’s almost to the exact same scene, except the sun is lower in the sky and everything in the van is covered in orange light. There’s also a piece of paper shoved up under his forearms so that he’s been hugging it to his chest. He opens it up and isn’t all that surprised to see a quick sketch of his sleeping face. Gerard likes to practice his speed-drawing technique sometimes – in this one, he’s only highlighted the shadows of Frank’s eyelids, the curve of his nose, the tiny shadow underneath his lower lip. It still looks exactly like Frank, though – he doesn’t know how Gerard does it.   
  
He holds up the drawing over the back of the seat and says, “It’s nice. I like it.”   
  
“Thanks,” comes Gerard’s voice. “Keep it.”   
  
Frank does so, folding it up and tucking it into the pocket of his jean jacket. He’s lost count of how many pieces of paper Gerard has given him, but they all emerge from various places when the band’s lucky enough to stop somewhere and do a quick load of laundry. A pile of white paper always ends up on top of the washer lid, unfolding themselves into little tents as Frank digs more out of his clothes. They’re not all of Frank, not by far. There’s a lot of random shit, too; last week, Gerard had given him a drawing of a radish with a caption that read, “I am a radish”. Frank slides them all into a wrinkled Safeway bag that he keeps stashed under the seat. As far as he knows, none of the other guys has a bag like it.   
  
“Here.” Gerard comes into view as he leans over the back and carefully places a shaved curl of a colored pencil on top of Frank’s forehead. “That’s a good one. Four whole spirals.”   
  
“You’re such a loser,” Frank tells him, but he keeps it there. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth when he talks, and everything tastes like old beer, Marlboros, and sleep. It’s familiar by now, and he hasn’t gotten sick of it yet. Gerard settles back into his seat; Frank stares up at the postcards again as the van rumbles on.   
  
It might be because this tiny period of relaxation, when no one’s bitching about the lack of space in the van or playing stupid road games, that their show that night ranks as one of their best. Everything is tight and together, more so than it’s ever been recently, and Frank throws himself into it as usual, getting stripes of fabric burn over his shoulder when he swings his guitar around and bruising the fuck out of his knees. The rest of the guys feed off his energy – the chords seem louder, the bass heavier, the crash cymbals that much more jarring. And the crowd, ebbing and flowing like a tide, a sea of shiny faces, pulls them further up, this weird sort of positive feedback loop that has Frank wired higher than ever before.   
  
After kicking over every single mic stand, including the one squatting in front of Matt’s bass drum, he hurls himself center-stage and presses bodily against Gerard without even thinking. Now all he can hear is screaming in his ear, the raw noise of Gerard’s voice against his skin. The only thing he can focus on is the urge to do something with the contact, to never stop moving with the music, to push out this energy until something breaks. He spits off the side of the stage and pushes his lips against Gerard’s temple, hard and insisting, with more than a little hint of teeth.   
  
Gerard never stops singing during all this. Instead, he scrapes his hand up against the back of Frank’s skull and holds him steady through their slip-sliding contact. And this – this is what Frank has been looking for. Someone who doesn’t move away, someone who knows that this is what it feels like to play onstage with pure physical instinct, thoughts disintegrating into static with every pump of distortion from the speakers. Someone who breathes hot against his neck and doesn’t let go until the music stops and the lights beam on.   
  
He pushes away when the breakdown comes up, immediately feeling a rush of cool air where Gerard had sweated on him, and manages to break two strings over sixteen measures.   
  
“Hey, that felt awesome,” Gerard says to him later, when they’re backstage and wiping the sweat from their faces with the hems of their equally sweaty shirts. He’s still a little drunk, Frank can tell by the sway of his steps, but he seems stable enough. Bob, the Used’s soundguy, high-fives all of them as he passes by with piles of cords slung over his shoulder.   
  
“Yeah?” Frank can feel a grin coming on; he’s inexplicably happier than he’s been in awhile. Playing shows is always great, but playing shows like that feels almost euphoric.   
  
“That  _sounded_ awesome,” Ray calls.   
  
And yeah, that too.   
  
  


*

  
It becomes their thing. Everyone has their thing onstage, in addition to being slightly drunk but not messily so – they’re uninhibited and still solid. Mikey hides out in the back next to Otter, who smashes the hell out of the drumheads; Ray goes into mid-lunge position and bobs his head. They’re all three independent performers, but Gerard and Frank eventually gravitate toward each other, pushing, tugging, shoving. The guys give them shit for it sometimes, but more so when Frank hurts himself. He’d broken his toes while kicking at some monitors in Massachusetts and is still hobbling around to the nagging of four different voices.   
  
By this point, tour has lapsed into one continuous show in his memory – the same songs, the same dimly lit stage, but different faces in the crowd. Everyone’s hands are always occupied, either with instruments or drinks, and Gerard has been hopping off with Bert increasingly often after the shows. Bert drops Gerard off to their room every time without fail, despite the fact that Bert himself probably couldn’t walk a straight line even if it was three feet wide. Frank feels an inexplicable bite of resentment whenever he sees them clutching onto each other like they’re all that they need in the world. He ignores it whenever possible but generally feels like an asshole anyway.   
  
Frank’s just about to pass the fuck out when there’s a sloppy knock at the door – more like the sound of a body slumping against the cheap wood than anything else. He glances around at the other bed, where Ray is in the fetal position and Mikey is facedown on his pillow, and at the floor, where Matt is sprawled and snoring.   
  
Another knock. Frank looks at his foot, which is currently wrapped in an Ace bandage and wearing a makeshift cast that Gerard had fashioned out of an empty box. No one else even moves at all the noise.   
  
Frank sighs and mutters, “Hold on, hold on,” when there’s another heavy thump. He limps over the carpet and hops the last three steps on his good foot before unlocking and opening the door. It swings open to reveal Gerard with an arm slung over Bert’s shoulders but still slumping down somewhere around the height of his hip.   
  
“Whoa’kay, Gee, let’s go.” Frank clasps Gerard’s free hand with both of his and pulls him in.   
  
“Dude, no partying tonight for you guys?” Bert grins.   
  
Frank wonders if Bert is perpetually wired on speed to be able to party like this all the time. “Nah, we did get pretty wasted,” he says, which was true. “It’s just, we’re fucking tired, man. Thanks for bringing this guy back, though.”   
  
“Oh yeah, definitely.” Bert waves him off and sticks his hands in his pockets, rolling up onto the balls of his feet before coming back down. “Save your energy for tomorrow, we’ll celebrate the last show. I bid you adieu, good sir.” He tips an imaginary hat before making his way down the hall. “It was a pretty light night, so he should be fine,” he calls over his shoulder.   
  
“Right. See ya,” Frank replies. Gerard is leaning against the wall opposite Frank; Frank has to shove his foot out of the way before the door can close. Still no movement from any of the other guys. Unbelievable. He hobbles his way to the bed in order to throw back the blankets before turning again to Gerard, who has started to giggle to himself.   
  
“What’s so funny, you lush,” Frank asks as he stands between Gerard and the bed. He has a specially honed method for getting Gerard into bed in these situations. It consists of reaching an arm out for Gerard to grab and then yanking it in while stooping a little so that Gerard is hauled over, at which point Frank uses his knees to stand straight again, letting the resulting momentum propel Gerard the rest of the way onto the mattress. Physics is amazing.   
  
Gerard lands with a bounce, still laughing. “You’re wearing a box. On your foot.”   
  
“Yeah, you made it for me, remember?” Frank decides to go the babying route tonight, despite the beginnings of his own hangover that are gnawing away at his ability to move without feeling a little nauseous. He sits on the edge of the bed, by Gerard’s feet, and removes his shoes by carelessly yanking at the laces.   
  
“How’re the toes, Frank,” Gerard asks in a voice that’s overly flat on the vowels. Frank crawls up on the unoccupied side of the bed and tugs off Gerard’s jacket, probably overextending some of Gerard’s joints as he pulls the arms off, but Gerard doesn’t complain.   
  
“The foot is still broken but healing,” he answers, pushing a hand onto the mattress right next to Gerard’s stomach so he can lean over and drop the jacket over the edge of the bed. “You feel sick? Are you gonna puke?” It briefly occurs to him as funny, the fact that these authoritative questions are coming from someone who was probably just as drunk as Gerard about three hours ago. It was the drunken hierarchy of taking care of people.   
  
Gerard shakes his head. “Nah. ‘m fine.”   
  
“Okay, I’m trusting you, then.” Frank isn’t really worried – Gerard usually tells the truth whenever he’s asked that question. He finally turns off the lamp that’s on the nightstand separating the two beds and the room plunges into darkness. “Go to sleep, okay?”   
  
“Uh huh.”   
  
The mattress shifts as Gerard moves around, turning this way and that before finally settling onto his stomach. Frank has been having relatively dreamless nights due to alcohol and fatigue, and this is their second to last one on the road. One more day, and then it’s finally time to go home, where they’ve been talking major label deal, three album contract. They all still find it surreal as hell. The big guys, corporate music dudes, all meeting with Alex and Brian and just waiting on the band themselves.   
  
“You can’t avoid it any longer,” Alex had said. “You were born here, but now you guys gotta grow up. Get out there.”   
  
“You’re going to be huge, you fuckers,” he’d added with a grin that was practically audible over the phone lines.   
  
Frank had smiled too, but he didn’t know about huge. The first newspaper review had been a little jarring. He didn’t know if they wanted it; he didn’t even know if they were ready for it. There wasn’t any time to pause and reevaluate any of that shit, though – and it was probably him being needlessly paranoid anyway.   
  
He's still awake when Gerard scoots closer, trying to match the angles of Frank’s body and fit himself against his back. It doesn’t really work, but he stays there anyway, breathing deeply against Frank’s hair for the rest of the night. Frank doesn’t move either.   
  
  


*

  


> _You’ve recently signed to a major label._
> 
> Yeah, we have. And I know we’re going to get shit for that, it’s inevitable. Even I was doubtful at first, but I really do think we’re ready now. You have to remember that there were major labels from the start – it was really weird – but we wanted to have time to grow as a band, to get our shit together and not jump ahead of ourselves. We’ve toured for about 30 years at this point, so. [ _Laughs_ ] I’m really looking forward to it. Gerard’s been writing lyrics, and yeah. Look out for it.

  


*

  
“Christ. Bed.” Mikey spreads his arms out and proceeds to fall face-first onto the mattress. A cloud of dust puffs up as soon as his body makes contact. “Oh god, bed,” he repeats, voice muffled against the pillow.   
  
Frank watches this from where he’s currently sprawled on Gerard’s bed, legs splayed, hand hanging off the side. They’re finally back in Jersey for the first time in months. As soon as the van had crossed statelines, all of them had cheered stupidly, delirious with exhaustion and the anticipation of being home. Frank hadn’t realized how much he missed it until he’d stuck his head out the window and almost cried at the familiar smell of the air.   
  
Gerard emerges from the bathroom, having changed into a black t-shirt and pajama pants. “What the hell, Mikey? Go to your own room.”   
  
Mikey grunts in response. Gerard pads barefoot over to his bed and gazes down at Frank. “And you, go home,” he laughs. Frank gives him a wide-eyed look. “Or scoot over,” Gerard says, and Frank obligingly rolls onto his side as Gerard climbs over him and tucks himself next to the wall.   
  
“God,” Gerard groans. “I can’t even – I think I might cry from the joy.”   
  
Mikey’s already snoring softly – not even snoring, just taking these huge, deep breaths that rattle the hollows of his throat. The sound alone makes Frank’s eyelids droop. He hadn’t even been home yet, and the thought of unpacking all his stuff makes him even more reluctant to go anywhere.   
  
“I don’t think I’m going to move any time soon,” he informs Gerard without turning over. It takes all his effort to speak and he hears himself as if in a dream, noises moving through fog and distance.   
  
“You can stay,” Gerard mumbles. He throws a quilt over the both of them, rustling around a little to get comfortable before dropping off to sleep almost immediately after. Frank listens to his breathing, which is so much calmer than when Gerard is awake.  A sleep free of worries or reminders to take pills.   
  
It wasn’t any secret that Gerard was on anti-depressants – had been on anti-depressants on and off for a long time. Whenever Frank caught a glimpse of a pill disappearing into Gerard’s mouth, he wondered what was going through his mind. Did the medication dampen his thoughts, fuel the lyrics? It was impossible to imagine.   
  
He seemed fine though, or he just hid everything really well. Most of their time was spent sleeping, playing, or going out, and Gerard seemed to revel in it, especially when he was with Bert. It was strange – they had immediately clicked, with Bert playing this self-proclaimed goofy older brother role, saying shit like, “Now son, when you become a real rockstar, you’re going to be doing blow off many a hooker’s back. Choosing said hookers should be a careful process,” all the while with his arm around Gerard’s waist and their heads ducked together. It felt like the old anti-social Gerard was a fading memory, a ghost of the past.   
  
But then, there had to be a reason why Gerard kept refilling the orange prescription bottles at pharmacies around the country. No one ever talked about it seriously. Frank could see how it was a tenuous subject, but that didn’t do anything to dull the curiosity.   
  
He focuses on Gerard breathing again, and finally, finally falls asleep.   
  
  


*

  
They sign the deal with Reprise three days later.   
  
“This is sort of fucked up,” Gerard says even as he scribbles his name, dark and glistening with black ink. “In the best way ever, I mean.”   
  
“Yeah,” Frank murmurs. He looks at his own signature, which looks abnormally large underneath all those lines of tiny fine print.   
  
“It’s going to be  _great_ ,” Craig says.   
  
  


*


	2. this elevator only goes up to ten

**this elevator only goes up to ten**  
  
  
  
“Hey, um - ”   
  
Ray’s voice cuts to static for a minute and Frank moves his head to hopefully compensate for the lack of reception on the other end. They had been back in town for barely two days and scheduled to leave again for LA this time, a straight shot across the country to record. Ray had already called him four times to clear up confusion about song progressions, and he knows Gerard’s practically been killing himself over lyrics. Being home wasn’t even a break – Frank hadn’t known this until Brian had told him outright. There were people to meet with in New York, conference calls to sit in on, people who drove down to Jersey to meet with  _them_ , and of course, there was writing. Writing an album while knowing that most of the people on the other side were just waiting to tear it apart sort of sucked a lot.   
  
“What’s up.” He’s chewing on his nails, waiting for Ray to ramble on about riffs or open string vs. fifth fret.   
  
But it isn’t that. When Ray clears his throat and speaks again, Frank stops moving altogether.  
  
“Gerard and Mikey’s grandma – she passed away.”  
  
“Shit,” Frank murmurs after a pause. It takes him awhile to absorb it, to make sure of what Ray said and to make sure that Frank understands him correctly. He has to fish for his next words; they come out clumsy and awkward. “I – when?”  
  
“Well, we got back last night. I think she was in the hospital then, and then overnight…”  
  
Frank rubs his eyes. “How are. How are they? Were they there?”  
  
“No.” Ray sighs heavily. “Well, Mikey was. Gerard, he wasn’t. You know how everyone was so exhausted – yeah. He’s really beating himself up about it. I just got back from their house. Maybe you could, you know.”  
  
“Christ,” is all Frank can say. Then, “Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I’ll go.” Even though he doesn’t know what to do. He’s never been able to handle grief particularly well, whether it’s his own or of other people.   
  
He eventually says, “Thanks for calling, man,” and they hang up with silence on both ends. He tries to pack after that – god, they’re leaving in a few weeks – but his hands pick up anything and everything and he ends up with a box full of shit he doesn’t need. He eventually just says fuck it and drives over to the Way’s house, sitting outside with the car idling against the curb for almost five minutes before he actually turns off the ignition.   
  
When he walks up the driveway, the porch light flicks on through motion detectors and he’s a little startled to see that Gerard is sitting on the steps, knees drawn to his chest, head in his arms. After hesitating briefly, Frank makes his way over and sits down beside him. The only indicator of his arrival is the sound of asphalt biting at the soles of his shoes. He’s reluctant, almost scared, to put an end to the silence with something as stupid as his voice.  
  
Gerard is crying, he realizes; not sobbing or bawling, but exhaling shaky breaths from trying to hold it in. Frank stares at the ground. He often wishes he had a handbook for these types of situations. The porch light goes out again in the absence of movement, leaving a residue of prickly, flashbulb spots in the dark.  
  
“Hey,” Frank finally says softly when Gerard shifts a little. “Hey.” He forgoes the ‘it’s going to be okay’ spiel, because Gerard would call bullshit and get pissed off, and rightly so. Instead, he wraps an arm around Gerard’s back when Gerard leans in and presses his forehead to Frank’s shoulder.   
  
“I should have been there.” Frank can feel Gerard’s words, hot and anguished, wet with tears and liquor. “I should have been there, it was stupid of me not to go right away.”  
  
“Gerard. There was nothing you could have done. You had no way of knowing.” He rubs slow circles on Gerard’s back, memorizing the hunch of his shoulders through touch. “She was sick for a long time.”  
  
“Yeah. But it doesn’t matter.” Gerard sighs. “I should have been there.”  
  
Frank doesn’t say anything to try and convince him otherwise because he knows it wouldn’t work. He just keeps with the circles until the light goes on again, this time because the door opens. When Frank cranes his neck, he sees Mikey standing in the doorway, glasses off and eyes a little swollen. It takes the two of them to lift Gerard up and get him into the house.   
  
None of them think to turn on the lightswitch to the basement; they take the stairs slowly, navigating by the stream of light that leaks down from the kitchen. The floor is covered with pens and pieces of wrinkled notepaper with lyrics veering up at angles over the light blue lines. Mikey doesn’t bother to kick them out of the way, and so neither does Frank. Gerard is already half-asleep by the time Mikey pulls the blanket up to his shoulders. They trudge back up the stairs and Frank gives Mikey a long hug as he leaves. No one says a word.   
  
Mikey’s back at the studio within the week, looking a little hollow but focused. He shakes his head and shrugs when they ask about Gerard. Gerard eventually emerges, not quite the same as before but still, he’s here and he says he’s ready.   
  
“Gotta write and shit. Get this thing going,” he says with a vague smile. Frank can smell the whiskey, but he doesn’t say anything about it – just gives him a hug like everyone else and cracks a small joke that elicits a smile and tries to buoy him forward.  
  
  


*

_  
_

> _Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Tell us what this album is about._
> 
> Basically, it started off as a concept album about this guy who needs 1,000 souls to be reunited with his lover. But it really changed along the way. Gerard and Mikey’s grandmother passed away while we were recording, which was this huge blow to the band. She had been there since the beginning, and she was a huge influence on where the band is now. So from that point on, the record incorporated a lot of our own lives, what was real and what we’d been through.

 

*

  
“Your D is out of tune.” Gerard is lying on the floor, parallel to the coffee table with his hands folded over his chest. Black hair spiders out over the carpet like exposed tree roots.    
  
“No, it's not,” Mikey replies placidly. He keeps plucking at the string. Something in the apartment resonates along with it with long, shuddering buzzes. God knows what the hell it actually is.    
  
“Yes, it is.”   
  
“No, fucker.”   
  
“Fucker.”   
  
“Fucker.”   
  
“Fucker.”   
  
Frank violently cuts into his pancakes. His knife scrapes against the porcelain plate.    
  
  


*

  
They moved in four days ago, him and Mikey. Everything's been sitting in boxes and will still be sitting in boxes by the time they finish recording, probably. It's an all right place; a little drafty in the bedrooms, maybe, and they've been having to take showers by candlelight since the lamp in there is busted. The smell is minimal, although it's the same, vaguely dour stench that keeps coming back - “what  _died_ ?” Gerard had asked - but it has four walls and three locks on the door and Frank is glad for that much.  
  
“That's good. It's hard to find a nice apartment around here for cheap,” Ray agrees amicably when Frank tells him about it. He's lying on the couch in the lounge of the studio and doing his practicing thing, where he holds his right forearm over his face and taps the fingers of his left hand over it like it’s a guitar neck. Frank wants to call him a fucking nerd, but he thinks about the fact that technically, Ray could probably mow his ass down on anything guitar-solo related. And he only throws in that 'probably' for his own self-esteem.  
  
“Yeah - yeah,” says Frank. He quickly swivels around in the chair to check that the doorway is still empty, and then turns back. “Okay, I'm going to bitch to you for a minute.”  
  
“Okay,” Ray replies, just as amicably.   
  
Frank doesn't waste any time. “So, Mikey? Total fucking slob. I'm all for messes, you know that. Messes don't bother me. But Mikey is dirty, Ray, he's  _dirty_ . Remember that episode of  _The X-Files_  where there was like, a garbage monster living in a landfill and killing everyone in that housing development? I wouldn't be surprised if I came home one day and that thing was sitting on our couch and eating our rotting bread.” He pulls at the strings of his hoodie until the hood molds over his head and his peripheral vision becomes constricted. “Plus, he won't do the fucking dishes.”  
  
Ray stretches his legs out and a bunch of flyers slide casually from the cushions to the floor. “Was that the episode where Mulder and Scully have to pretend they're married?” he finally asks.   
  
“Yes,” Frank says in monotone. The conversation - or bitch session - ends right on time as the sound of the front door opening and closing accompanies Gerard and Mikey's muted bickering along with Matt’s heavy footsteps.  
  
“Chinese. Chow mein,” Gerard declares before tossing Frank a take-out box. It careens several inches away from Frank, but he manages to dive to the side and catch it with one hand. A dull heat and patches of grease immediately coats his fingers; it's a familiar feeling, forever associated with impossibly late nights and recording the same guitar riff about eighty times and then listening to it another four hundred times.   
  
“Why the fuck do you look like a bobsledder?” Mikey asks, lifting his chin to motion at how Frank's hood is still tightly covering half his face. He mutters, “Gross,” when a piece of chow mein slaps against his glasses and slides off with the slow satisfaction of coating the lens in grease.  
  
“Hurry up and eat so we can work on this,” Ray urges, but his own mouth is full of fried rice and he’s digging for more from the flimsy carton.  
  
“What’s this one called again? ‘Ghosts’? ‘You’re a Ghost’?” Frank asks.  
  
Gerard swallows his food and takes a gulp of water. “’Ghost of You’. Way to name all the possible permutations, though.” A second piece of chow mein comes flying in his direction.   
  
Even though the basic environment was the same, recording with a major producer had its perks. The studio was fucking huge, and Howard had an entire back room filled with guitars and basses. Vintage Gibsons and Epiphones, American Fender Strats, Limited Edition Telecasters – Frank had played the lick from ‘Walk Don’t Run’ on a PRS Modern Eagle, all the while worried that the guitar would somehow, for some reason, explode in his hands. Even Mikey would sit in front of a huge bass amp, slowly plucking out warm, jazzy tones on his own. Ray was perpetually wide-eyed, rattling on about gear specs while he reverently touched several guitar necks and floating bridges like a kid in a candy store.  
  
“The thing about a humbucker as opposed to a pickup, you know,” he’d start, and then everyone would know to tune him out. Frank was happy to play whatever, as long as it had six strings and made noise.   
  
They eat messily, spilling greased up vegetables and noodle bits everywhere. “So, I think I’m going to go up on the last chorus, on the ‘should I’ part,” Gerard says absently. He hums a few notes to himself. “Yeah.”  
  
“Which part?” Ray asks.  
  
“The very last chorus. Like, ‘could I, should I’.” Gerard sings it hesitantly. “Right before the song ends.”  
  
“Sounds good,” Ray says. “Yeah, yeah, that sounds great,” he confirms after hearing it in his head.  
  
They finish the song two nights later and, buoyed by finally making Howard satisfied and having a breakthrough in recording, go out to celebrate (“’Celebrating’, is that what the kids call it now?” Ray had asked after the first few times). Even after months of living here, LA seems like all buzzing lights and music with bass beats thumping through walls. They never had to go to the same place twice, if they didn’t want to. Celebrating had been taking place maybe about two times a week since they’d arrived; it just seemed to go with their situation. Recently, it had been upped to three to four times a week as soon as the end of the record had come into sight. Weekends disappear, and Friday leaks directly into a head-pounding Monday morning. Frank can’t say he really minds all that much.  
  
It’s 80s night at whatever club they’re at. The sounds of The Cure follow them into the bathroom and abruptly become dampened out when Frank shuts and locks the door behind them.   
  
“You know they have a nickname for me and Mikey,” Gerard informs him loudly. His voice echoes off the tiles that are covered in graffiti of different colors – names, inside jokes, curses, proverbs.   
  
Frank scans the walls, then watches as Gerard takes out a bag from his jacket pocket. “Who’s they?”  
  
Gerard talks without looking up. “People. Anyway,” he waves his fingers, “they call us the chemical brothers.” He contemplates the toilet lid, but instead chooses to empty the bag onto the sink.  
  
“Well jeez, that’s original,” Frank snorts. “But I guess it makes sense.”  
  
“I know, right? It’s pretty funny like that.” Gerard grins up at him quickly before turning his attention back to the powder that had spilled out of the bag.   
  
In the spirit of celebrating, Frank usually takes whatever Mikey or Gerard have to offer – mostly Xanax, but sometimes Vicodin, occasionally some X. Ray shrugs and go along with it; so does Matt, in addition to drinking like a fish. But this time, instead of pills, Gerard had procured some coke from this shady dude he’d met a couple weeks ago wandering around in Echo Park. Frank had thought, okay, yeah, why not, and that had been the end of it.   
  
He leans down and sniffs it up from the edge of the sink, giggling a little at the ensuing noise and his immediate reaction to rub at his nose. “God, it’s so – cliché,” he says, watching as Gerard copies this process. He sniffs again and clears his throat. They hang around in the bathroom for a while, waiting.  
  
“Things are cliché because people do them a lot because it’s pretty fantastic,” Gerard rambles abruptly.   
  
“You’re not going to be saying that when we’re crashing,” Frank warns, but he can’t even look that far ahead right now. His body is starting to hum, nerves stretched tight and sending all kinds of flickering signals to his brain. He pictures tiny explosions of light and electricity all throughout his body – maybe it’s enough to power a whole city, grid by grid.  
  
Gerard laughs and grabs him by the arm, tugging him out of the bathroom. “Come on, let’s get a fucking drink.”  
  
They were supposed to meet the other guys at a bar somewhere, but it seems unimportant - Frank only gives it a passing thought. The rest of the night flies by in a blur of colored lights and voices surrounding his head like a crown of noise. Things only seem to slow down when Gerard suddenly nuzzles his neck for a couple seconds, breathing soft and slow, but when Frank runs his hands up Gerard’s own neck, he can feel the pulse beating in a jittery rhythm under his fingers, pumping red oceans with each tiny thump. It’s been so long since they’ve played a show – long in their terms, anyway – and he’s missed this. The proximity, the familiarity. Gerard.  
  
“You’re fucking crazy,” Frank tells him, and they’re so close that he can see the black of Gerard’s pupils and the slightly unfocused way they look back at him. “You’re fucking crazy and I love it.”  
  
“I love  _you_ ,” Gerard counters, yelling over the swell of noise in the club. He points out to the crowd. “Fucking LA, man.”  
  
“Fuck LA. To Jersey.” Frank lifts his drink – he doesn’t even know what it is but he feels the burn of alcohol in the back of his throat when he downs it.   
  
And yeah, he has fun, and yeah, it’s partly the drugs. But mostly, mostly it’s just this right here, Gerard hanging on to his arm and laughing hysterically at something he’s describing. Frank can only hear snatches of words here and there, but he doesn’t even really mind because watching Gerard happy makes his night in and of itself. Of course, later, he’ll remember that for Gerard it’s largely the drugs, not like it is for Frank. But right now, all he can see is swirling lights and the way they sweep over Gerard’s relaxed form, and he’s good, he’s all good.  
  
  


*

  
A few weeks later, Howard drives everyone over to an old studio in the outskirts of the county to try out a new environment and see how it fits the songs for the vocals. Gerard’s up in the attic supposedly recording the prison song but actually doing who the fuck knows what. The rest of them are in the makeshift kitchen downstairs and everyone looks up synchronously whenever there’s a particularly loud thump or a scraping noise that lasts more than three seconds.   
  
“I told him to do whatever he needs to,” Howard shrugs, speaking around a mouth full of Madeleines, the only snack they could find after rummaging through all the cabinets.  
  
“Gerard,” Ray states. He just shakes his head with a smile, and really, that’s Ray’s reaction to everything in a nutshell - but it’s also the reaction that Gerard elicits from people in a nutshell.   
  
“It’s funny, I never saw him as the rockstar dude,” Matt says, leaning his chair back onto two legs. “But the potential is there.”  
  
“It’s definitely there,” Frank agrees. He tosses a Madeleine to Mikey, who’s leaning against the kitchen counter looking bored at the topic of conversation.   
  
The snack is caught with one hand as Mikey abruptly cracks a smile and says, “You guys know he played Peter Pan for a musical in junior high, right?”  
  
Ray sprays some crumbs out of his mouth. “No way.”  
  
“Yup. Our grandma made him the costume and everything.” His face clouds over a little at the mention of her, but he’s still smirking at the memory. It’s yet another sunny afternoon in LA, flawless in a way that makes Frank almost wary, and he’s sitting in a slightly breezy kitchen, thinking about kid Gerard as Peter Pan. He bites into a Madeleine and smiles.  
  
“Tights,” Matt states. “ _Green_  tights.”  
  
“Yup.”  
  
“Green hat.”  
  
“Yup.”  
  
“With a feather,” Frank adds. All of them crack up at this.  
  
Gerard comes downstairs about an hour later. He’s tugging his shirt down over his stomach and flips his hair out from underneath the worn neckline.   
  
“Did you take your shirt off?” Ray asks, looking confused.   
  
“Yeah,” Gerard answers simply. “It got a little weird up there.”  
  
Frank tries to suppress a laugh but it just comes out as a snort. Gerard looks at him.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing.” Frank waves him off. “Gerard, do you ever wish upon a star?”  
  
“What?” Gerard repeats, looking around with a faint smile of knowing he wasn’t in on something.  
  
“So how  _are_  the Lost Boys?” Matt asks.   
  
Gerard stares at Mikey. He breaks into a smile. “Oh  _fuck_  you Mikey, you did not.”  
  
“He totally did,” Ray says, grinning widely.   
  
They take turns ragging on him for the rest of the week, and even Howard gets in on it by the end of it. Frank pretends to be Wendy, clasping his hands to his chest and batting his eyelashes up at Gerard until Gerard pushes a palm against his face. Still, he doesn’t give up.  
  
“Let’s fly together, Peter,” he crows, grabbing Gerard around the waist and pulling him around. He suddenly thinks of that night at the club – Gerard’s laughing the same way that he had then, anyway.   
  
Gerard says, “I swear, I’m going to start a new band,” but he finally stops fighting against Frank’s grip.   
  
“Where would you be without us, Gee, come on now.”   
  
Gerard looks at him in that weird, intense way, and Frank tightens his hold reflexively. And they spin, shoes crunching against gravel, Frank’s cheek pressing against Gerard’s collarbone.  
  
  


*

_  
_

> _How did recording go? Was it a smooth process?_
> 
> It was definitely a learning experience. Howard Benson, our producer, taught us so many things about songwriting and musicianship in general, and this was a big studio. Like, really big. Sort of nerve-wracking to go in there at first, but we put everything we had into it. All we did was eat, sleep, write, and record. Zombies. We were zombies.

 

*

  
Frank fumbles with his keys, trying to unlock the door without setting any of the grocery bags down. He kicks it open without removing the key from the lock; darkness greets him, except for one lone spot of red light in the kitchen.   
  
“Goddammit, Mikey,” Frank mutters. He dumps the groceries by the fridge and gropes around in the dark until he finds the plug to the coffeemaker and pulls it out. The red eye blinks out. Frank gets annoyed all over again. He retraces his steps to retrieve his keys and pull the door shut, finally flicking on the lights as the deadbolt clicks into place. When he turns around, he sees someone lying on the couch and almost has a heart attack.   
  
“Fuck, Gerard!” Frank practically yells. He massages his chest, feeling like his heart has just tried to leap out of it. Gerard peers at him with his eyes barely open.   
  
“Dude. Lights,” he croaks. “Turn them off.”  
  
Frank obediently turns them off, trying to calm his pulse down. “What happened? Why aren’t you at your place?”  
  
“Too far. I didn’t want to take a cab,” Gerard mumbles. Frank shuffles his way over to the couch, letting his eyes get used to the dark until he can see the rough shape of Gerard’s head at the far end. He kneels by it and rests his palm on Gerard’s temple.   
  
“You okay?”  
  
“A little wasted. Fine.”  
  
Frank unconsciously rubs his thumb against Gerard’s skin; he hums in response, shifting a little so that he fits better under Frank’s hand. Frank keeps his thumb moving, just slow, steady strokes. It occurs to him that Gerard has progressively been drinking more and more, but then Frank can’t really fault him for it because they’ve all been doing the exact same thing.   
  
“Hmm. That feels nice,” Gerard says quietly. Frank’s vision has adjusted enough so he can see Gerard’s eyelids flutter a little. He gets a funny feeling in his throat, something familiar by this point. He does what he always does – swallows it down and quickly gets his body moving. It doesn’t really work.   
  
“Get some sleep,” he says as he stands. He wipes his hands on his pants, tries to scrape the feeling of Gerard off his fingertips. Gerard mumbles something that sounds like, “no, stay,” but Frank’s already in the hallway and he brushes it off to imagination, because if it’s not, then.   
  
Then, what the fuck. He has no idea.   
  
Once Frank gets to his room, he strips down to his underwear and doesn’t bother brushing his teeth, choosing instead to fall straight into bed. It takes him less than ten minutes to fall asleep. The past couple weeks at the studio have been nonstop, and he knows it’s only going to begin again tomorrow.   
  
True to thought, the rest of the week passes in a storm of mixing tracks, playing the same riff about two-hundred times, and Howard yelling at each of them in succession. As the finish line approaches, camping out in the studio feels like the right thing to do - as if spending more time in there, letting their blood, sweat, and tears seep into the air, will somehow have an impact on the outcome.  
  
“We’re close,” Gerard murmurs. “Can you feel it?” He turns his head to look at Frank, who opens his eyes in time to meet Gerard’s gaze.  
  
“I feel it,” Frank agrees. His cheek is mashed against the dirty carpet, but he’s so tired that he couldn’t give less of a shit. “And down the stretch we come.”  
  
Gerard snorts lightly and stares up at the ceiling again. A few more finishing touches, rerecording a verse here and there, and they would be done. He begins to hum to himself. No particular melody, just random notes within a scale. The Xanax must be kicking in now; seeping into his bloodstream, coating everything with a soft layer of contentment.   
  
“I feel good,” Gerard says, right on cue. “I feel good about everything now.”  
  
“You feel good,” Frank repeats. He’s so uncertain around Gerard sometimes, like the world is shifting and reforming and he never knows if they’re on an edge, about to fall. Some days he feels like he should – like he’s going to – say something about the pills and the booze. Most days he feels like he has no right to because hell, he’s not a fucking saint either, and he doesn’t. “I’m glad,” he says. Gerard grins and rolls onto his side to face Frank fully.   
  
“Frank,” he begins, but he just keeps looking into his eyes and says nothing else. Frank blinks.   
  
“Hey,” he replies. He reaches out and takes Gerard’s hand in his own, squeezing it as reassurance (to Gerard or to himself, he doesn’t know). Gerard’s skin is warm to the touch, pliable but solid. Something uncurls in Frank’s chest – he doesn’t have time to swallow it down - and he feels an urge to move closer, to have – more.  
  
He thinks it’s an urge that stemmed from their stage shows. Somewhere along the way, Frank has realized that it’s not only about contact; it’s about contact with  _Gerard_ , both onstage and off. It tugs at him at the oddest times: when they’re rolling through the Midwest, half-awake and buzzing on coffee, or when he watches Gerard concentrating down on his notebook, oblivious to anything else happening around him. He can’t wholly ignore it anymore. It’s there, nagging at his mind when he tries to sleep, onstage when he feels Gerard staring at him as he screams into the mic, and finally – it took awhile to admit it to himself – when he has one hand pressed against the wall, head lolling forward as he jerks off in a venue bathroom.   
  
Yeah.   
  
It’s controllable, though. He can keep it in check – or at least this is what he tells himself. He doesn’t let himself think of it as an option, because the last thing to make it better would be to act on this shit while Gerard is perpetually recovering from the night before.  
  
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep it off this time.  
  
  


*

 

> _I think I might be underestimating a little when I say things are going well for you guys._
> 
> [ _Laughs_ ] Yeah, it’s going great. So great. I can’t even – see? I’m speechless, it’s going so great.
> 
> _The record sold more in its first week than the lifetime sales for the first album, is that right?_
> 
> Right. Right. The reaction we got from fans was unbelievable. They’re the ones fueling all of this, and I’m so glad that they’re here to share it with us. We’re really excited about everything that’s been happening. Playing shows is all we’ve been thinking about. Like, getting back out there to be in touch firsthand.

 

*

  
  
Frank always wants to laugh at the sound of water gurgling as someone takes a hit. It's just so reminiscent of being in high school and he kind of hates himself for it sometimes, but before that feeling can gain any ground, it's usually his turn in the circle. He should feel like he’s too old for this, but Mikey had shown up with it, Ray had been game, and Gerard and Matt were off drinking their way through half of downtown to celebrate finishing the record. Frank really wasn’t one to crash a party.  
  
He flicks the lighter on and takes a slow, smooth inhale to bypass the burn in his throat. The smoke crowds his lungs and simmers there until he finally breathes it all out, exhaling up towards the ceiling lamp so he can see the grey streaming out of his mouth. A few more rounds later, he's feeling pleasantly twitchy and when he turns his head, everything shimmers and skips like a scratched CD.   
  
“Okay, Mikey.” Ray holds his hand out in front of him, palm facing down, patting the air a little. “I'm only asking you this out of pure curiosity, okay? Mikey? Okay?” He continues to pat the air even after Mikey nods while staring at him blearily, as if this motion will fuel the question. “Okay. Curiosity. Is. Gerard. Gay.” He pats with each word. Frank cracks up before the question is even fully out of Ray's mouth.   
  
“What,” Mikey yells. “I. What! God, I don't even want to - Ray!”  
  
“Ray,” Frank chokes out. His laughter turns to breathless squeaks and he slumps against the couch, feeling it bubble up from his chest.   
  
“It was an honest question!” Ray shifts his gaze back and forth between them with genuine panic at the possibility that Mikey might be mad. “Dude, seriously! Honest question!”  
  
“I don’t  _care_ if it was – god, you don't ask someone that when you're fucking smoking out and your, and your,” Mikey wiggles his fingers next to his temple, “your imagination is going in overdrive! Mental images, Ray,  _mental images_ , oh my god. Ray.”  
  
“Ray,” Frank repeats. His face feels melded to the couch cushion and the muscles in his cheeks hurt. The compulsion to laugh is fading away now, leaving only the occasional hiccupping giggle. He's teary-eyed and suddenly exhausted, but he feels great.  
  
“You know, both of your reactions make the answer pretty obvious,” Ray says delicately with his hands folded in his lap, as if he’s conducting interviews for a scholarly journal and not getting high in a basement studio with half a band, none of whom have taken a shower for two days. Mikey inexplicably boos at him. “I just asked what everyone's been wondering for a pretty long time. Right, Frank?”  
  
“I mean, he's had girlfriends,” Frank dodges, managing not to answer the question directly. He sits up. The blood rushes out of his head, leaving him a little woozy with his vision spotted with primary colors. Maybe this isn’t - maybe he's interested in the answer too. Maybe he's  _been_  interested. Maybe he always was.   
  
Maybe. He mouths the word to himself. Maybe. Maybe.  
  
“Well yeah, he’s had girlfriends, but that’s always the first sign!” Ray declares.   
  
“The first sign of being gay is having a girlfriend?” Frank repeats. Ray waves him off exasperatedly.  
  
“You know what I mean! Anyway. Mikey. I was asking you.”  
  
“Ask me tomorrow when I'm not about to burn my brain at the thought of Gerard doing illegal sex acts,” Mikey says wearily. Saying it out loud seems to bring up a fresh wave of grimacing. “Oh god Ray, while I'm  _high_ ? Not cool, man.”  
  
Ray shrugs, but he's still wearing a shit-eating grin. Frank can't stop himself from pursuing the subject when it looks like it's on the verge of dissipating from the conversation. “Maybe there's just something wrong with his dick.”  
  
“Jesus, Frank - ”  
  
“Yeah, yeah!” Ray nods vigorously with renewed speculation. “I can see that happening. The horror movies. The angst. The dick problems. It all ties back to it.”  
  
“I bet it's fucking crooked as a grasshopper leg,” Frank giggles out. Ray chokes and tries to laugh silently into his forearm and in turn, Frank starts laughing even harder. He tries to crawl up onto the couch for no reason other than the fact that if he doesn't move, he feels like he's going to die from laughter.  
  
Ray, face red and wheezing a little, manages to cough out words: “Dude - dude. Now I'm thinking of my old car, the one with the terrible alignment and you had to turn the wheel 45 degrees to the left to make it go straight - ”  
  
“Fuuuuuck.” Mikey stands up and grabs his jacket. “You guys are  _fucked up_ .” He disappears out the door, still muttering to himself. Frank doesn’t stop laughing until well after the door has slammed shut. Now that things have calmed down a little, he feels nicely stoned, all loose limbed and relaxed.  
  
“Yo, we just finished our second album,” Frank informs Ray after awhile, as if he hadn’t been there to suffer through the entire process.   
  
Ray lets his head drop back until it’s caught by the couch cushions. “I  _know_ .”  
  
  


*

  
The record drops.    
  
Gerard is outside, getting the news from Brian and some label dude over the phone. Frank straddles a chair, biting at his nails and trying not to look at the other guys. Sales don’t matter, they really don’t, but he’s nervous anyway. Nervous because if it bombs, then this is the end. Nervous because if it sells, then he has no idea what the fuck’s coming next.    
  
The door opens, letting in a quick leak of sunshine.    
  
“Um,” is Gerard’s opener. They all stare back at him until he breaks into a smile.    
  
“Over 11,000 records. In the first week.”   
  
11,000. The number hovers big and glaring in Frank’s mind, then places itself onto an imaginary scale. He’s still trying to process it as everyone else yells, hugs, slaps each other on the back, and hugs again. Mikey’s the first to put his arms around Frank, and then he’s finally up, feeling lighter than he has for weeks now.    
  
“Wow,” is all he can say. He shakes his head. “Wow. Shit.”   
  
“This is it,” Ray keeps saying. “This is it.”   
  
They’re on top of a high-floating balloon, soaring with prospect and all the doors that just opened up. Frank feels elated, ecstatic – other ‘e’ words. He stands up and hugs Ray.    
  
“This is it,” Ray repeats.       
  
  


*

 

> _I heard you guys are getting a bus?_
> 
> Yes! A bus! With bunks! I think we celebrated for about a week once we heard. That van – oh god, that van has been through some tough times. 
> 
> _Fights, territorial battles –_
> 
> Exactly. The lack of personal space really grates on your nerves sometimes. Like, it’ll be fine for awhile, and then one day you’ll just snap out of nowhere because someone’s toe touches your leg or something. We would basically drive for ten hours, play the show, and get back in the van still soaked in sweat and repeat the whole process. 
> 
> _Any more glamour you’d like to tell us about touring life?_
> 
> The stink. The stink is really something. Especially – especially. [ _Laughs_ ] Yeah, especially Gerard. His is like, a Chernobyl of stink. 

 

*

  
  
More touring. And more. And yet more. Warped Tour has been a complete mess of scenes in his memory so far – a consequence of waking up everyday with the nasty bite of a hangover right behind his eyes, but they have a new and roomier environment for him to be hungover in. A fucking bus.  
  
They’re on it right now, with Gerard lying down on the couch in the front lounge. The cigarettes are taking their toll on him, judging by his waxy skin tone and nicotine stained fingernails, but then again, so is the drinking. The drinking is just –   
  
Frank equates it to that blind spot in everyone’s eyes that gets smoothed over and filled in by things surrounding it. A concentrated dark blot on everything, clouded by happier shit like playing shows and hanging with people. Ray looks the other way, Mikey curls up into himself, trapped by the boundaries of being a younger sibling, and Matt even encourages it. Frank tries to make light of it – he likes to sit next to Gerard's head when he's lying down and poke his index finger into Gerard's mild double chin, a product of all the beer he chugs down daily. Sometimes Gerard tucks his head down and makes it easier for Frank to push at the soft skin. Occasionally he tries to bite Frank’s finger. Today he lifts his head so Frank can slide a leg underneath as a pillow.   
  
“We have a bus,” he says, smiling up at Frank. “We’re sitting in our own fucking bus.” None of them have gotten over this fact yet.  
  
“I know.” Frank runs his fingers through Gerard’s hair, dark and glistening with oil. “We have a bus. So when are you going to take a shower?”  
  
Gerard scrunches his face. “The bus doesn’t have a shower, so never.”  
  
“We got bunks, though,” Frank points out. “They’re like coffins – I guess you’re a big fan of them, then – but they’re bunks. With mattresses.”  
  
“I know.” Gerard sounds gleeful.  
  
There’s a lull in conversation. An empty bag of chips and various small scraps of paper already litter the lounge area, but it’s a fucking  _bus._  Frank doesn’t really give a shit as long as he gets to sleep lying down and there’s a place to brew some coffee.   
  
“So,” Gerard says. “Your place or mine?” He wiggles his eyebrows.   
  
“Neither,” Frank answers. “Back lounge. Sofa. Floor space.” He pretends that the question hadn’t made his lungs constrict a little.  
  
Gerard laughs, open and happy. “Amenities. We have amenities! On a bus!”  
  
The door opens then and Ray’s head pops into view. “We have a bus!” he announces, unknowingly echoing Gerard. He’s been saying it every time he walks in, though. “Matt’s out getting beers with Mikey,” he tells them as he plops onto the opposite end of the couch. “We need to celebrate this shit. Again.”  
  
“Fuck yes,” Frank says. It’s way easy to just let responsibility slide off his shoulders; it’s even a relief.   
  
He drinks that night, enough to make him forget conversations mid-sentence and knock things over, only to apologize profusely and then promptly forget about it again. The kind of drunk you get when you don’t know your limits yet – everything is partying, one and the same, and nobody will give you shit for it because they’re all at that same point.  
  
“I like Warped Tour,” Frank tells Mikey later, his vision both hazy and bright. Mikey just pats his head.   
  
They laugh hysterically when Ray pulls away from a beer bong too early and gets foamy liquid all over his hair. The first bus isn’t scheduled to pull out until about three hours later, so members from almost every single band mill around the parking lot; there’s talking, laughing, and drinking from every corner of their little bubble.  
  
“Sup, bitches,” Matt says from behind them. He clunks the base of his beer bottle against Mikey’s skull, then Frank’s. He and Gerard have pretty much created their own league of drinking by this point. Ray calls them ‘The Terrible Twosome’, and Frank settles for the more obvious ‘Drunken Assholes’.   
  
A thump reverberates through Frank’s head, but he only hears it and doesn’t feel it. It’ll probably hurt like hell tomorrow, but right now he simply turns around and grins at Matt.   
  
“I want to do this for the rest of my life,” he says to no one in particular. Matt yells something in agreement and Mikey nods with a huge smile.   
  
“What, be wasted?” Gerard has returned and is now clinging to Mikey’s arm.   
  
“Pretty much. And play shows. Cold beers and shows, that’s all I need.”  
  
Gerard points at Frank. “You got it. We’re gonna make it happen.”   
  
Someone decides to blast Gerard in the back of the head with a beer-filled Super Soaker right then. He turns around to yell but the stream catches him in the face, effectively choking off all words. People start passing out more weapons and soon the night dissolves into this decadent version of a kid’s birthday party. It takes at least half an hour for the relatively sober to confiscate all the guns and another to herd everyone on to their respective buses.   
  
By the time Frank stumbles into their kitchenette, his shirt and hair are soaked through and sticky. He feels disgusting, but only gives it a fleeting thought before Gerard comes in and hugs Frank from behind, clasping his hands over Frank’s stomach. Frank instinctively covers his grip with his own palms and tilts his head forward to accommodate the press of Gerard’s forehead against the back of his neck.   
  
“We’re gonna make it happen, Frank,” Gerard murmurs. He lifts his chin up and presses a kiss to Frank’s spine through the wet collar of his t-shirt. “We’re gonna make it happen.” And he sounds so sure of himself that Frank believes him whole-heartedly, and he’s sure that Gerard believes it too.   
  
The only difference is that Frank still remembers the conversation when he wakes up, and Gerard doesn’t.  
  
  


*

  
Frank can’t pinpoint the exact moment it started going downhill. Everyone always says rock bottom invariably begins with a gradual slide, which he never bought, but it actually turns out to be true.   
  
Drinking every night makes days indistinguishable from one another, especially because they have a routine that comes with it. Touring constantly seems to breed vices, just through its very structure. There are good nights, and there are bad nights; tonight is one of the bad nights. Frank doesn’t want to be a downer, but this - this meaning Gerard, this meaning Gerard drinking, this meaning Gerard being a drinking dumbass - is getting kind of ridiculous and impossible to overlook. Yes, Frank gets drunk too, but he gets less drunk than Gerard and Gerard is like, depressed drunk. To be honest about it, he has been, for the past year or something. Maybe even longer. Frank knows this; everyone knows this, and no one wants to talk about it.   
  
The big drunk elephant in the room. It's fucking fantastic.  
  
“Dude, you - ” He stops walking because the parking lot seems to be spinning a bit and Gerard stops too, without the locomotion of Frank. Frank tries to heft Gerard's arm more securely over his shoulder but it's hard with all the alcoholic slumping that's plaguing both their spines. “Come on man, help me out here.”  
  
“Zmphf,” Gerard mumbles.  
  
“Gee? Let's go. We can do this.”   
  
Gerard manages to be a bit more eloquent this time. “Fraaank.”   
  
And it doesn't get much better. At least Frank manages to get them both moving again; he has to spit Gerard's hair out of his mouth three times before they get to the bus. By the time he dumps Gerard onto the kitchenette couch, the spins have dissipated somewhat and he's able to fumble through the fridge and retrieve some bottled water. He chooses to keep the lights off, for both their sakes.  
  
“Here.” He unscrews the cap and hands it to Gerard who, thankfully, is able to drink it on his own. Frank watches him take a couple sips and sits down facing him with one leg folded up on the cushion, knee pressing against the back of the couch.   
  
“You all right?”   
  
Gerard rests the bottle on his chest and lets his head loll back. He blinks and sighs just as heavily. Stage makeup is perpetually smeared over his eyelids nowadays and his skin shines an unhealthy sort of grayish pink in the dim glow of the industrial streetlamps lining the parking lot.   
  
“Yeah man, I'm good,” Gerard breathes unconvincingly. Frank glances down and pulls methodically at tiny pieces of lint on the couch cushions.   
  
“Listen,” he begins without looking up. “I don't - “ He finally lifts his gaze when he hears a soft shift beside him. Gerard's looking at him blearily; Frank chokes on words that were never really there in the first place.   
  
“You really fucking smell, man,” he finishes, cracking a small, lopsided smile. He feels helpless and stupid. Gerard is a fucking grown man, and he can take care of himself.   
  
But then again, he really can't.  
  
“God, I. I want to strangle you sometimes,” he mutters.   
  
Gerard raises his eyebrows at the non-sequitur. “Those are some anger management problems, Frank,” he says slowly. “What childhood memory are you repressing, man.” Frank guesses this is a question, but Gerard's voice trails off at the end.   
  
“You ever think this is getting a bit too much?” Frank asks in a quiet voice. “The booze and the pills and stuff. I mean, I’m obviously not anti-drinking or anything, but – you don’t think it’s a little out of control?”  
  
“No,” Gerard says flatly, and that’s that. Normally, Frank would clock him straight in the mouth, but he doesn’t have the energy to. Plus, he knows it would only make Gerard defiant in his drinking, which would be even worse.   
  
He bites his lip. “Get some sleep, I’ll be right back,” he finally says, and rubs Gerard's kneecap a bit. He's about to ask if he needs help getting into bed, but Gerard'll probably get pissed about being treated like an invalid.  
  
Gerard throws up a silent back-handed peace sign. Frank smiles a little despite it all.   
  
There's an empty beer bottle on the dashboard, of all places. He walks out of the bus, clutching it in his hand. The glass becomes warm and slightly damp under his tight grip; it shatters somewhere out in the dark when Frank flings it up toward the streetlamps. The noise isn't satisfying in the least. He's still pissed the fuck off at Gerard, at the drinking, at the fact that they're all just hoping it'll go away. At the fact that people have tried to do so much in order to not give the band any reason to fall apart and here's Gerard, who has the power to throw it all to hell with one more glassful of whiskey, and -  _shit_ .   
  
Shit.   
  
He rubs his face with a sticky palm, wishes he had something else to throw, kicks at a few large pebbles in lieu of something else to throw, curses to himself a few times, and then tells himself to fuck off because he's being an asshole about everything.   
  
“Stop it,” he mutters to himself. “Just stop it.”  
  
He inhales deeply, then walks back to the bus to help Gerard into bed.   
  
It can’t get any worse.  
  
  


*

  
  
It gets worse, because Gerard starts draping himself over Frank whenever he drinks, and Frank either wants to throw him off or fuck him. Both options seem like they wouldn’t bode well. There’s the risk of head injuries, and drunken sex never appealed to Frank, except sometimes when he himself was drunk and even then it was a shitty thing.   
  
In a fucked up twist, relationships between all of them have been falling apart as well, and it’s like watching a slow but sure domino collapse working its way down the line. Conversation has worn thin, with the slow drip of resentment seeping into the way their mouths stay closed and tight-lipped, and in the way they all try to spend as much time as possible with their backs turned to each other. Ray and Matt have begun sniping at one another all the fucking time; Frank just turns up the music on his headphones and watches the lines rush by on the highway.   
  
Right now, he’s sitting at the tiny dining table in the bus, nervously tapping his fingers on the surface. There are practically nothing but bad nights anymore.   
  
Gerard pushes a hand-mirror across the table. “Here.”  
  
Frank examines it, the way his reflection is partially obscured by the white powder that’s tented into a messy line on top of the surface - nothing like the straight, dark lines of Gerard’s sketches. He hasn’t done coke in months – he’s avoided it, actually. It’s a shitty feeling, a drug trying to pull him up when he doesn’t want to go. There haven’t been any pills either, and only a few drinks here and there. They’re in Kansas, and Gerard is offering him a line of coke. This strikes him as funny for some reason, in a completely humorless way.  
  
“Come on, Frank,” Gerard says, a little coaxing but also a little desperate. It creeps in around the spaces of his words, something that anyone else wouldn’t pick up on but it’s practically all Frank can hear.  
  
“Why me?” Frank asks helplessly. “Isn’t Mikey – ” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Gerard stares at him with a carefully blank face.  
  
“Yeah,” Frank exhales after a pause. “Yeah, okay – ” He leans down and snorts it up before his brain can process the action. Christ. Gerard is smiling at him now and Frank just feels abruptly, incredibly sad. He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the couch, waiting for the shitty illusion of a high to kick in and drag him out. The post-nasal drip is starting already; he swallows against it, grimacing at the taste.  
  
Gerard moves around the table, drops himself next to Frank, and kisses his forehead. Frank imagines it leaving a white, powdery imprint as Gerard tucks himself against Frank’s side. The pace is uncompromising; they never stop moving, never stop trying to escape old mistakes only to repeat them again in a new place.  
  
Neither of them moves for awhile. Then Frank gets up a little shakily and climbs over Gerard to go to the bathroom and when he comes back, the bus is empty. He checks every bunk and the back lounge twice over, but there’s no sign of Gerard. Frank tries to convince himself that he was only wandering around and would be back any minute. He also tries to convince himself that his pockets were empty and that he didn’t have anymore drugs on hand.   
  
Frank waits for someone – anyone – to get back. Mikey and Ray finally return from a late dinner about half an hour later.  
  
“Hey.” Frank sits up immediately. “Have you seen Gerard?”  
  
“No,” Mikey replies. “Why?”  
  
“He disappeared on me.” Frank adds, “He was a little drunk, I think,” and tries to make it sound nonchalant. He’s still a little skittish.  
  
Ray shrugs. “You know him,” he says, carefully avoiding looking anyone in the eyes. “He disappears all the time and then shows up when he feels like it.”  
  
It was true – Gerard had been doing the disappearing act for awhile, but never directly in front of Frank. Maybe that was why Frank was a little freaked.  
  
“Right,” Frank says. “Yeah, I know. It just got to me a little, because he left while I was right here.”  
  
Mikey looks slightly worried now. “Maybe we should look for him.”  
  
“Maybe.” Frank forces himself to laugh. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything. Like you said, he pulls this shit all the time, he’s probably fine.”  
  
“We’ll look for him if he doesn’t come back soon,” Ray proposes.  
  
There's really nothing else to say. Mikey bites the inside of his cheek for a moment, then takes his jacket off and sits down in the lounge. Ray walks to the back of the bus, presumably to his bunk. It's too quiet. Each second is a struggle for Frank; he fights against the impulse to tear out of the bus and scour the streets until he finds Gerard.   
  
Later - Frank has no idea how much time has passed - someone bangs their way onto the bus. Ray emerges quickly as Mikey and Frank sit up, but it's Matt. His entrance is so effusive and out of place that Frank wants to throw something.   
  
“Hey motherfuckers,” Matt greets cheerfully. When he reaches out to muss Frank’s hair, Frank moves away slightly. He isn’t in the mood for Matt’s shit. “What’s with the funeral vibe in here?”  
  
“Gerard’s gone again,” Mikey answers, striving for casual. “We were going to go look for him.”  
  
Matt shrugs. “I’m sure he’s fine.” And that’s all he says before opening the fridge and pushing things around. It’s always all he says. Mikey stares at him sullenly. "So what'd you guys think about the show today? I was thinking we should turn the monitors up next time."  
  
“Well, about that,” Ray says, a little hesitant. Christ, he could have picked a better time. “I was wondering if we could - well, the show today was a little,” and here Ray makes tilting movements with his hand. Mikey shifts his gaze to the floor, and Frank does, too - they both know what's coming.  
  
“A little what?” Matt emerges from the fridge with a bottle of beer. He raises his eyebrows but frowns them back into place as he catches on. “Oh god, is this going to be that stupid clicktrack argument again? I told you, that thing throws me off. Who cares if the tempo changes a little, nobody notices that kind of thing, dude. How many times are you going to talk about this?”  
  
“People notice,” Ray shoots back, the mask of patience quickly crumbling away. “People  _do_  notice that kind of thing. How many times are  _we_  going to have to talk about this, because this isn’t only coming from me, you know. And it isn’t just that, you keep changing up the fills on the songs. We’re trying to put on a show here, and – ”  
  
Matt is quickly incensed. The beer hangs from his hand, unopened and forgotten as he gestures with it while cutting Ray off with a loud voice. “I’m trying to keep it interesting and not the same damn show every single night. It’s sloppy but it’s in the moment, not some mechanized robot shit where you fucking reel off all the songs and get the hell offstage as soon as it’s over.”  
  
Ray blinks rapidly. “No one wants to come see a show that sounds like it’s been chopped up and put together as we’re playing, Matt. Can’t you see it from that angle?”  
  
“The only angle I think you’re seeing it from,” Matt grits out, “is from some sleazy corporate asshole that wants to sell records.”  
  
“We  _wanted_  to make it,” Ray rolls his eyes. “We  _wanted_  to get big. If we wanted to keep our shows as careless as they sound now, we’d be back in Jersey playing at fucking bars downtown and getting paid in drinks.”  
  
“Which was all we wanted in the first place, from what I remember. Fuck, guys, is anyone going to support me here?” Matt holds out a questioning palm. Mikey looks away, still obviously angry about Matt’s utter lack of concern about Gerard. Frank is still crashing; he closes his eyes and leans his head back. He doesn’t want in on this same old fucking argument, so he doesn't say anything.  
  
“What the  _fuck_ .” Matt glances around at each one of them, making sure of their silence. “Really? Really. So this is where the record deal and the bus and the fame got us, huh?” He pauses, as if to give them another chance to interject, to agree, to calm things down and say things went too far. It's expected that someone will, because this is the part where someone always does, anyway. It’s never gone further than this point in the fight.  
  
Frank opens his eyes and looks around, but no one says a word.   
  
It's like the scene is on pause, quiet and unmoving, and only jars forward again when Matt laughs bitterly, disbelievingly. He can’t quite keep from looking surprised at ending up here. The fact of what's happening is sinking in now and Frank tries to feel shocked enough to backpedal, to say that none of it meant anything and that they could work it out, but he can’t even muster up the energy to care.   
  
Matt’s still standing there. Frank almost feels embarrassed for him, at the fact that he’s so obviously an island now – he wants to cry, he wants to trash the fucking bus and rewind everything back to the beginning.   
  
Instead, he sits.   
  
“That’s just fucking great,” Matt finally spits. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Fucking great guys, yeah. Thanks - thanks for everything.” He turns away, disappearing down the steps and into the dark. Ray makes to go after him, putting a hand on the counter and leaning forward a bit, but after a moment, he bites his lip and retreats to his bunk, and now there’s only silence. Frank has stopped keeping track of the cities, they’re flying out over another ocean again in two days, and now there’s only silence.   
 _  
Just one second_ , Frank thinks wearily.  _I just want one second._  
  
  


*

 

And then things come to a grinding stop in the middle of it all. The ensuing mess has been a long time coming, but they’ve just been ignoring it, hoping it wouldn’t come to a head. 

“Work it out by yourselves,” Brian sighs over the phone. “It isn’t anyone else’s deal but yours. You can’t expect – I can’t do anything about it. I don’t  _want_  to do anything. The only thing I’m going to remind you of is that you’re about to go on tour, so make a decision.” 

He sounds harsh, but Frank can almost picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, having a couple aspirin on hand. 

“Okay,” Ray says in an even voice. “We’ll let you know.”

They disconnect the speakerphone and sit in silence around the table. Mikey has his head down, pillowed in his arms; Ray clasps his hands together on top of the table and Gerard is staring at some invisible speck next to the phone. Jetlagged and fucked, is how Frank thinks of it. The flight home had been bad – Gerard was sick most of the way, trembling and clammy even as they each took turns holding onto him.

He hasn’t had a drink since they’ve been back. Frank tries not to dwell on it.

Japan had been two days ago – one of the longest trips of his life, one of the worst shows in their career. Frank felt incredibly heavy, like the last thing he wanted to do was play his fucking guitar on that stupid fucking stage with the scent of Gerard’s puke still permeating the air. Playing was and always had been the deciding factor for Frank. No matter how bad other things got, he would have stayed for the shows. But in that moment when all of them, band and crew, were crowded around the stage and trying to convince Gerard to come out, that conviction disappeared. Frank had been wondering how far it was going to go for awhile now, and this was the answer: in a foreign country, playing to thousands of fans in what should have been the best gig ever, but he had to fight the urge to hand his guitar over to someone else and walk off the stage without looking back. 

“Burn it,” he would have told a tech. “Smash it, throw it into the ocean, I don’t give a fuck. Just get it the hell away from me.”

It wasn’t only that, though. Ray was right - the shows had been getting increasingly off, both technically and performance-wise. The band had become divided over who was willing to do what in order to correct it, a divide that had driven that fight on the bus to make it a fucking chasm. None of them were sure what to do about it after that – they had left things wide open and flown overseas, and things still weren’t resolved. Which was what this whole meeting was about. One problem at a time, Frank thinks, and then he almost wants to laugh.

Mikey raises his head. “So Matt – ”

“ – is out,” Ray finishes flatly. 

There’s another silence. Objectively, it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Bob Bryar had been the first name on everyone’s mind when thinking about a replacement, and he was almost sure to say yes. He would sit in on the video shoot and things would go from there. 

On the other hand, it was Matt. It was fucking  _Matt_ , and they were supposed to leave him behind. One of their best friends, someone who’d been through it all and toughed it out with them. They had made two albums together, for fuck’s sake. They were a unit. 

Frank looks around the table. But they really weren’t. Not anymore.

“Okay. Okay, so.” Ray scratches his elbow.

“I’ll go,” Frank finds himself saying. Gerard finally glances up at this. “Call Brian, tell him to start driving out. I’ll – I’ll go with.” He feels a deep pit of self-loathing beginning to form, but he pushes it down and sticks to his words. “I’ll do it,” he repeats.

“Are you sure?” These are Gerard’s first words in almost an hour. “Are you guys sure about this? Is this the only way…” He trails off, but he knows. They all do. 

It’s Frank who gets up first. He makes his way through the house – Gerard’s mom’s house, where the furniture and the lighting are still the same – and lights a cigarette as soon as the front door clicks shut behind him. He concentrates on breathing in deeply and exhaling slow. The cigarette is gone within five minutes, leaving a heady feeling in its wake. 

He smokes another one. 

When he finally goes back inside and down the stairs, he’s expecting to find Gerard already halfway through a bottle of Dewar’s, but Gerard is just sitting on the edge of his bed, hands folded neatly in his lap.

“I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to,” Gerard begins. Frank cuts him off.

“Don’t be sorry. We shouldn’t,” and then he runs out of words. He sits down next to Gerard. The old mattress sags under his weight. “I don’t even fucking know anymore.”

Gerard chuckles humorlessly. “Yeah. Yeah, me too. This is what we need to do, though. Right?”

Frank just nods.  _How the fuck should I know?_ , he wants to say. 

He studies his shoes instead. Then, Gerard says, “I’m done.” When Frank looks at him, he’s staring at the small patch of sunlight on the carpet. 

“Drinking, I mean. I’m done drinking. And I’m done with the pills. And I’m – I’m done.” Gerard rubs at his nose. “Fuck, I’m so – I‘ve been so stupid, and I knew it even as it was happening, and I don’t know why it took me this fucking long to do anything. Inertia and all that, you know, and I, I’m so sorry – ”

“Don’t,” Frank interrupts, when he finally finds his voice, “say it. Don’t.”

Of course, there was a time when what Gerard is saying right now was all Frank wanted to hear. But it’s gone now; the urge to shake Gerard, to yell,  _do you have any idea what you’re doing to yourself?_  The resentment has burned away in this instant, the very moment Gerard started talking and Frank caught on, and all that’s left is what was there in the first place – his feelings haven’t changed because, after all, this is still Gerard, sitting small and quiet in his childhood room. Gerard, who went through hell in his own mind and came out on the other side a bit harder around the edges but still – mostly – intact.

“The other guys already know,” Gerard says. “I, uh. I told them while you were outside.” He chances a smile up at Frank. He looks pale and more than a little haggard, but he’s steady. “I know it’s not going to be easy,” he adds quickly. “I’m not like, writing it off as a simple thing. God knows that plane ride was hellish enough. There’s going to be withdrawal, and other shit.” He looks down, that smile still frozen on his face. “Shakes. Delirium. I don’t know.”

Frank sits, feeling utterly lost. Then he wraps his hand around Gerard’s, pressing his fingers down against the valleys of knuckles and resting both hands on his leg. Not speaking, not moving, not even daring to breathe too loudly; just sitting, and hoping.

“I trust you,” he finds himself saying, and it isn’t even what he was aiming to come out with in the first place, but Gerard leans into him anyway, breathing against his shirt.

When Gerard stage whispers, “I think I was maybe a little depressed,” for some reason, this is the funniest thing Frank has heard in weeks. He feels a tickling sensation bubbling up from his chest; Gerard’s looking up at him with clear eyes, and then he’s tucking his face into Frank’s neck and dissolving into giggles that shake the both of them. Frank finally allows himself to laugh – it’s funny, why is it funny? – and he squeezes Gerard’s hand as he does, and he can’t help but think that maybe, maybe it’ll be okay.

> *
> 
>  _  
> How have things been lately?_
> 
> They’ve been – they’ve been pretty great. So much has changed. Gerard got sober, he um, he quit drinking, cut it out of his life, and he’s holding strong. We also have a new drummer, Bob Bryar, who was the soundguy for the band The Used. It’s been a lot to take in, but everything is moving in such a positive direction, so I’m really happy about that. The shows have basically reinvented themselves for the better.
> 
> _And are the guys handling fame okay?_
> 
> I don’t know about fame, but. Oh man, we’ve played on TV a few times now, and that was – now  _that_ was crazy. Especially when were on MTV. Conan was awesome, too. I love Conan. But MTV was fucking surreal.  
> 

*

  


The video shoot had gone well. Really well, actually. Bob was a better drummer and a better person than they could have asked for. Shows – shows were shaky at first, not in the music but in the performance. It was a little jarring to look over and see Bob instead of Matt, to hear Bob counting out four beats on the high hat before songs. Frank had played the first few with his back to Gerard a lot, almost afraid to watch him as if this was the first My Chemical Romance show all over again. Maybe it actually was, because this time Gerard was sober. Completely sober. 

“Fucking terrifying,” Mikey had muttered to Frank after the first show. Frank had gone over to Gerard, who was wiping his face with a towel, and asked how it had felt. 

“Fucking terrifying,” Gerard had replied immediately, unknowingly echoing Mikey, but his eyes were bright and his smile, though a little shaky, came easily. 

Then things had gradually come together and it was like looking through a glass that was newly wiped clean. Japan was now just a dark blip in Frank’s memory; as far as he was concerned, the real beginning of the band was after they had come back. There were moments, of course, when he’d feel a pang and realize that no, it wasn’t fucking easy to leave a friend behind, no matter what the circumstances were. It had been different in the end, twisted almost beyond all recognition, but the fact remained that Matt had been there and now he was gone. Trying to get Bob to fill that hole was like trying to shove a square block into a circular opening. Bob was Bob, Matt was Matt, and sometimes Frank missed him, pure and simple.

No one wants to wait for them though, or even give them any breathing room, so they’re still moving and playing and talking, answering the same questions from people who look at them and have no fucking idea about anything. Frank has learned how to skate through the prying, how to give enough information to satisfy. He leaves out details like showing up to Matt’s house with Brian on his tail, watching the door swing open with a blank stare, or finding Gerard in the bathroom that first day, clammy and shaking from withdrawal. He doesn’t tell them about the rest of it either, the meetings and the therapy, but then it genuinely doesn’t matter to him anymore. They’re here, Bob is here, Gerard is clean. This is what he sticks to. 

Frank has long since stopped being nervous about getting interviewed or playing shows with videocameras present, but this is something different. The TRL studio is smaller than Frank thought. The show, though, is every bit as planned out as he’d suspected. Applause is timed, as are the ‘spontaneous’ shoutouts and everything else that they do. 

Frank leans forward to Ray and whispers, “This is weird.” Ray nods emphatically, eyes darting around. Gerard looks over his shoulder with a questioning expression. 

“This is weird,” Frank repeats in a louder whisper. Gerard screws up his face in agreement and turns back. A sober show, still new to all of them, with a new drummer, and all this on national TV. 

Frank tries not to think about it.

“Does everyone here actually like us?” Mikey asks him. 

“I don’t know man, I don’t want to make an assumptions but I’m guessing they do.” Frank peers out into the audience through the door that leads to the stage. There’s a lot of black and red clothing and more than a few armbands. Lots of zombie makeup, too.

Frank tries not to laugh to himself. What had they started, he wonders. He sees Gerard tapping his heel against the floor while opening and closing his hands compulsively, and he wants to go over to him, make him stand still, but Mikey’s the one who nudges him and whispers something. A private joke, probably. Frank looks away and shoots a quick smile at Bob, who still looks pissed that the crew wouldn’t let him outside to have a cigarette. Before he can say something to annoy him further, the audience erupts with cheers and someone with a headset comes forward to usher them down the stairs and onto the stage. 

He blinks at the brightness, at all the standing bodies that are waving their arms and screaming loudly for them. The VJ – Colin? Names are had to remember these days – immediately delves into the script, and they file up onto another stage when signaled to by some other guy with a headset. 

Frank feels a rush of relief when Ray starts with the openings chords to “I’m Not Okay,” just because it’s something familiar. He might have overdone his response to that feeling though, seeing as how when he steps up onto Bob’s bass drum, a very familiar perch, this is the day that he loses his balance and basically flips everything out from under him as he falls. 

_Shit,_  he thinks. Then,  _Bob is going to kill me._

He plays harder to compensate.

Sure enough, after the show, when they’ve safely been escorted to their hotel by police – fucking police escorts, what the fuck – Bob lights a cigarette, much to the cringing of the concierge, and yells, “Goddammit Frank. I was freaking out back there.” 

“Dude, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened.” Frank bites his thumbnail. “I was nervous, man.”

Bob looks at him suspiciously. “It’s true!” Frank insists. 

Thankfully, Mikey chimes in. “Yeah, I kind of thought I was going to throw up.”

“You kind of looked like you were going to throw up,” Ray says helpfully. “It was making me want to throw up.”

“This is a beautiful conversation,” Frank says.

“I felt fine,” comes Gerard’s voice, seemingly out of nowhere. They all turn to look at him. He’s been standing off to the side for awhile now, just gazing out into the street and giving an occasional wave to the fans that had managed to follow them. 

“I felt fine,” he repeats. “I mean, yeah, I was fucking nervous. But I think it’s going to be okay, this whole ‘I’m not going to be a drunken ass’ thing. Performance-wise, at least. And other ways, too.”

And there it is. The final piece falling into place. Frank can practically feel the click. He didn’t even know that it was what he was waiting to hear - Gerard’s own assessment of the situation. Everyone looks surprised and cautiously happy. 

The thing is, whenever Gerard says it’s going to be okay, they all believe him. 

“Someone say something, you guys are creeping me out,” Gerard says after a beat. He rubs his nose with the heel of his palm and doesn’t look at anyone.

It still takes awhile for someone to respond. Finally, Ray says, “Well, shit.  _He_  feels fine. Meanwhile the rest of us are about to have heart attacks and Bob is about to beat Frank to death.” He laughs, and the rest of them join in. Dwelling on it would make it awkward, though, and so the conversation dissolves into arguments about what to order from room service and what time the pool is open till. The only sign that Gerard ever said something is that Mikey goes over and hugs him tight.

Bob offers the last drag of his cigarette to Frank, who inhales gratefully and flicks the butt to the ground. They start to file through the revolving doors of the hotel. 

“Gerard!” several girls scream from across the street, where cars are whizzing by much too quickly for anyone to cross. “We love you!”

Gerard waves to them. “Yo, fame is fucking weird,” he mutters.

“Get used to it stud,” Frank claps him on the back. He’s light and content for the first time in recent memory, like he’s coming up for air after swimming around in black water for months, and it feels good.

 

*

“Bleach it out,” Gerard had said, peering at Frank’s hair in a critical way as a cigarette slowly burned away between his lips. 

They’re both squished into the motel –  _hotel_  – bathroom now. It’s a small, unforgiving space that seems crowded even when it’s only the two of them as Frank sits on the toilet seat, watching Gerard lean over to scrape some bleach onto his head. 

“This stuff stinks,” Gerard comments with a wrinkled nose. 

“I feel like I’m burning a third nostril into my nose from the fumes,” Frank agrees. He continues to watch Gerard through the mirror as he squints at Frank’s hair, unaware of the attention. 

“Just the sides, right?” he asks. 

Frank nods. “This is so going to be one of those times,” he muses, “that we look back on later and wonder what the hell we were thinking.”

“Like Mikey and his hair,” Gerard smiles. He stops with the bleach as Frank tilts his head back and laughs. 

“Mikey and his hair! Oh my god. I completely forgot about that. The birdhouse.”

“The birdhouse,” Gerard repeats. “Yup.”

Frank snickers again at the memory. Gerard carefully brushes some solution above Frank’s ear with steady, practiced strokes; his cheap, plastic gloves make crinkling noises every time he moves. 

“It’s burning my scalp,” Frank announces. “Can I have a cigarette? It’s burning my scalp.”

“You want a cigarette while bleach is burning your scalp?” Gerard frowns at Frank’s head, as if to figure out how to stop the burning. He cocks the right side of his hip as he puts all his weight on one leg and finally looks into the mirror at Frank. “Want me to wash it out?”

Frank turns his head to the side and tries to study the state of his hair. It looks pretty fucking blond. “Count down from ten,” he instructs.

Gerard takes a breath and says, “Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…”

“Five four three two one, Jesus, you count slow.” Frank stands up to unhook the shower head and hovers over the tub. He fumbles for the faucet. 

“Oh, god.” Gerard removes his gloves and grabs the shower head, turning on the water and testing the temperature on his fingers before spraying Frank’s head at an angle. “Look what I do for you even after you criticize the skills I learned from after school specials.”

Frank hums. He can’t be bothered to form a real answer because, not that he’s one to take a liking to being babied, but god, having someone else wash your hair is definitely a feeling he could get used to. Gerard massages the bleach out, carefully wiping the shells of his ears and down over the base of his neck. Having a wet scalp but a dry everything-else feels better than he could have ever imagined.

“Feels nice,” he finally says. Maybe he’s getting old. Maybe this is what getting old is like – reveling in scalp massages and shit like that.

He hears Gerard huff out a smile. “Good to know that I missed my true calling as a beautician.” Frank’s scalp is now blissfully burn-free, but Gerard keeps washing. These days, he focuses on tiny tasks, meticulously going through the motions as distractions to take up time. Frank doesn’t really mind right now.

“Okay,” Gerard says a few minutes later, just as Frank’s neck is starting to hurt from hunching over like that. He starts to stand up, but pauses when Gerard says, “Wait, wait,” as he’s rinsing off his fingers. He turns off the water, hangs up the shower head, and whisks a towel off the rack. It turns out to be a tiny hand towel; he drops it on the floor and reaches for the huge one, enveloping Frank’s entire head. 

“Okay, now stand up.”

Frank obediently stands up. All he can see is soft white as light peeks through the towel fibers. He closes his eyes as Gerard dries his hair. Everything feels slightly surreal – one moment he’s soaked in sweat, both his own and other people’s, screaming into the dark of a venue, and then the next he’s feeling as clean as ever, wrapped in a cotton towel under the quiet lights of a private bathroom. The world behind his eyelids gets suddenly brighter as Gerard slides the towel down around his shoulders. 

“You alive?”

“Barely.” He’s suddenly sleepy. “Hotel bathrooms apparently breed sleepiness,” he says out loud. Gerard’s palm brushes over the short bristles of hair on the sides of his head. When Frank opens his eyes, Gerard is so close to his face that it’s a bit startling.

“Does it look okay?” Frank asks, stumbling a little over his words. 

Gerard stops moving and slides his gaze to meet Frank’s. “Hmm? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it looks awesome. I’ve got talent, I tell ya.” He smiles up at Frank’s hair. Some of the longer black strands are clumped and trickling water over his forehead; Gerard smoothes them back with one hand, the other one still splayed over the side of Frank’s head. 

(Later, Frank will say he felt some sort of weird compulsion, like this was it. After all the years that had passed, this was the moment in which he had to do something. He had to fill in the spaces of this little pocket of time as he and Gerard stood almost toe to toe in a tiny, well-lit bathroom, with ten fingers worth of contact between them.)

Frank looks at Gerard’s lips. They’re a little chapped from his biting them in concentration. Gerard’s not paying attention again, instead choosing to fluff out the limp mohawk with his fingers. There’s a tiny spot of bleach up near his temple, and his eyes are ringed in red – Frank doesn’t know if it’s the residue of day-old stage makeup or plain exhaustion.

He reaches up and hangs his hands from the crooks of Gerard’s elbows. “Gerard,” he says, just because. Just to say the name. His voice sounds abnormally loud.

As soon as Gerard looks, Frank leans forward, chin tilted up, and kisses him. It feels like hours, but probably only three seconds pass before he gathers control over his motor skills and pulls back. He sees that Gerard had closed his eyes for it; they’re blinking open now, and then he’s staring at Frank quizzically. There’s no noise in the bathroom, not even a fan, and the fluorescent light intensifies the silence. Frank feels nauseous all of a sudden, like he used to get back in high school.

“I didn’t mean to,” he begins uncertainly, having no idea what words should come next, but Gerard moves in close again and Frank stops talking as he just hovers there for a moment before pressing his lips to Frank’s.

It lasts longer this time – much longer, as Gerard cautiously opens his mouth but Frank is the first to use his tongue. He licks at Gerard’s lower lip, still slow, still careful. Gerard slides a damp hand underneath Frank’s shirt, the top of his palm resting parallel against his spine. 

After another moment, in which Frank becomes brave enough to push his tongue against Gerard’s and nip at his mouth a little, Gerard presses his forehead against Frank’s and uses the leverage to push away from his mouth. 

“Um,” he says. He breaks into a smile before he can go further. “You’re so nervous.”

It’s true; Frank’s heart feels like it’s hammering its way out of his chest. He says, “This isn’t, you know. A spur of the moment thing for me.”

“I know,” Gerard assures. “I was only – ” He breathes out a laugh. “God, where have you been?”

Maybe it’s rhetorical. Frank answers anyway. “Right here, same as always. Where the hell have  _you_  been?”

Gerard crooks up the corner of his mouth. “Scared, at the bottom of a bottle. Lost in my head.”

_Christ_ , Frank thinks. “I would have done this so much earlier if I’d known you would react this way,” he says. He moves his hands up Gerard’s arms, one gripping his shoulder and another up near his ear. This closeness is driving him crazy but it’s still Gerard’s move, and he waits, a little shaky.

“I always would have,” Gerard replies in a low voice. “Reacted this way, I mean. Since the beginning.”

Frank swallows against the sudden dryness in his throat. He’s probably imagining it, but still. “Well, good to know that now, jesus,” he jokes half-heartedly, but then Gerard finally pushes him backward as they kiss for the third time. The toilet tank lid shifts with a scrape as Frank’s hip pushes against it, and then several bottles fall to the floor in succession, but all Frank wants to listen to is the sound of Gerard breathing in his ear, the sound of him kissing Frank with an unwavering touch.

 

 

He thinks about the scene in the bathroom for a long time. Now that they’ve crossed over – Gerard giggles when Frank puts it that way, “it’s like we’re on a TV show about psychics” – there’s this weird period of rediscovery, where Frank can openly touch Gerard whenever he feels like it, or appreciate the way he huddles close to Frank as he sleeps, without trying to talk himself out of what it could mean or what it could mean. 

He wishes he could tell his past self that this is what it leads to: sneaking kisses behind guitar cabs, Gerard’s bare skin under his hands, finding out that Gerard is every bit as infatuated with him as he is with Gerard. And what’s more is that Gerard talks to him – actually talks to him, in soft tones and without making eye contact. About everything, about anything. Sometimes he gets pissed at himself when he thinks about all the wasted time, but not for long, because merely the thought of it – of him, and Gerard – is enough to change his mind, to make him realize that he wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

*

 _  
_

>  _So what’s next for you guys? Break?_

> Taste of Chaos, and then Warped, and then more touring after that. We’re going to tour until someone’s limb falls off, I think. And only if that limb is a vital limb for playing the instrument. Break is – I actually don’t know when our next long break is. Probably right before we go in to record the second album. 2057, I’m guessing. We’ve been catching up on sleep and stuff when we get to stay in hotels every now and then. Hotels are amazing because they have real beds and stuff. And nice towels.  
> 

  


*

  
Before they know it, it’s the start of another year. Frank wonders when this will stop being a surprise to him. They get a call about headlining a new tour called Taste of Chaos. Everyone’s up for it, Gerard most of all. 

“I think he’s looking for an excuse not to shower again,” Frank says to Ray, who nods furtively in agreement. “Oh, Bob. You missed out on the days of the van. The rank smell that plagued us for weeks until we figured out it was Mikey’s shoes and then Mikey himself.”

Mikey swings his leg out without looking up from texting on his Sidekick; Frank dodges it easily. 

“You’re really one for courtesy, aren’t you?” Bob grins. 

Frank likes Bob. Frank likes pestering Bob even more. He jumps on his back after getting a running start, he swings into his bunk, he bangs on the snare drum during soundcheck until Bob shoots him this look that could probably cause a bunch of air molecules to band together and punch Frank in the face. He’s just brought an end to a two day streak where he had added, “in bed” after every single time Bob said something.

“He gets so pissed, it’s kind of funny,” he’d giggled to Mikey. 

“You just like pushing other people’s buttons,” Mikey had sniffed. 

“In bed,” Frank had said. 

“Fuck,” Bob had said loudly, coming out of nowhere. “If you say that one more time, I will kill you.” He’d windmilled his arms at Frank a few times to demonstrate his seriousness.

“You’ll kill him…in bed?” Gerard had joined in, looking up from a magazine. Frank had patted his foot in thanks for the support, and then rubbed his ankle when no one was looking.

“I just want to impress you, Bob,” Frank says now. “Won’t you let me impress you?”

“God, you really bring out the five year old him.” Ray shakes his head.

Bob insists, “It’s not like I’m trying to or anything. He doesn’t even get scared when I threaten to kill him.”

“You would really kill this?” Frank gestures to himself, draws out an invisible circle around his face. “Really?”

“I think he would,” Ray confirms. He looks up at Bob. “Yeah, he would.”

Gerard tosses his comic onto the table, effectively throwing in the towel in his part of the conversation. He’s almost out of the bus when Mikey calls, “Where are you going?”

“I don’t need a fucking babysitter, Mikes,” Gerard replies, but his face is relaxed, his tone slightly teasing. “I’m going to hang with Bert for a bit. I’ll be sure to bring the car around and be home by curfew, okay?”

“Fuck you,” Mikey says, but Gerard is already off and navigating between the maze of buses. Frank watches him go from the window until he disappears in the dark. 

“You guys don’t think,” Frank starts. He only thinks to clamp his mouth shut after the words have made it out. 

“Think what?” Bob asks. He grabs the comic Gerard had been reading and begins to thumb through it. 

“That him and Bert, you know. That Bert could be a potentially bad influence.” Frank feels stupid for saying it. It sounds even more terrible out loud. 

“It’s his decision,” Ray says as Bob falls silent like he usually does when this topic comes up, however rarely. “You can’t – none of us can keep watching out for him for the rest of his life. He’s a grown man, he makes his own choices. All we can do is support him when he needs it.”

Secretly, Frank doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with this. Although he can see where Ray is coming from, Frank knows he’d pretty much do anything to prevent Gerard from even feeling like he needed a drink, and he’d pretty much kick his ass if he  _did_  have a drink. He’s found that it’s exponentially easier to be aggressive about things on this side of Gerard’s sobriety.

The whole Bert thing makes him feel like a dick, though. Bert’s a nice guy; Frank has always liked him, but that doesn’t stop him from having problems with certain sides of Bert. It also doesn’t stop him from getting that twinge of jealousy and paranoia in his belly every time Gerard is within five feet of Bert.

“It’s okay, I worry too.” Mikey worms a hand under his glasses and rubs his eye. “God, I sound like our mom.”

“I was just being dumb,” Frank covers. “No worries.”

He spends the next moments defending himself when Mikey says he indirectly called their mom dumb, which brings him back to some semblance of normalcy for a few hours. It disappears when everyone announces lights out and Gerard still hasn’t returned. Frank lies in his bunk, half-heartedly listening to some music as he stares up at the ceiling that’s about a foot from his face. This makes him vaguely claustrophobic after awhile though, so he turns onto his side. A few seconds later, the curtains slide open to reveal Gerard squatting down, one hand grasping the side slat of the bunk for support. 

“Hey,” Frank whispers after a pause. He pulls out his earphones and three sets of snores greet him immediately. Some nights on the bus were no different from spending a night at a zoo. 

“You aren’t sleeping yet?” Gerard murmurs. Frank shrugs silently and focuses on Gerard’s knees. The denim is broken in, almost worn; Frank puts his hand on one and rubs the material with his thumb, watching the fibers bow under the touch. 

Gerard threads his fingers through Frank’s. “You said you trusted me,” he states. “When I decided to get clean.”

“I do,” Frank replies. “I fucking know you.” He gives Gerard a crooked smile – he does know him. The stubbornness, the drive, the focus, and the precarious balance on which they’re all aligned. The easiness with which it could all fall apart, but also the determination to not let it happen. 

“You’re complicated as hell, kid,” he says, still with the smile, but Gerard looks worried, almost perturbed. Frank shakes his head slightly and leans out to press a quick kiss to Gerard’s chin. “I meant it in a good way, dummy.”

“Then know that I’ll tell you when – if - something’s up. I’m not some delicate china cup or whatever,” Gerard says quietly. “I’m not going to collapse into a nervous breakdown any second. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway,” he adds in an ironic tone. He ducks down and brushes his lips against Frank’s before standing up, knees cracking audibly. 

“Oh,” he says suddenly, turning around and kneeling back down. “And don’t be jealous of Bert.”

“I’m not jealous of Bert,” Frank counters, even as he feels the flush of embarrassment creeping up the back of his neck. It’s a welcome break from the subject beforehand, though. He willingly takes it further by saying, “As long as you don’t like, play ‘grab dick’ with him.”

“Right, so nipple tweaking is okay though, you mean,” Gerard says nonchalantly. He cracks a grin as Frank makes a face. 

“Just know that I’ll kick your ass if anything happens.”

“I do,” Gerard echoes Frank. “I fucking know you.” He smiles oddly, presses his hand against the curve of Frank’s jaw for a brief moment, and then finally moves into his own bunk right above Frank’s.

 

*

  
In some ways, headlining Warped is no different from playing sidestages – they still sweat the same, they still smell the same, and they still spend their lives on the moving shitpiece that is the bus. Of course in other ways, it’s different this year; everyone’s relatively sober – Frank slips up once or twice, and he’s sure the other guys do too – and Mikey spends a questionable amount of time on the Fall Out Boy bus but he’s never actually questioned about it by anyone in the band, mostly because it weirds them out to even think about it. 

“Mikey’s an open-minded kind of guy,” is all Gerard says. He passes most of his time in the back of the bus, headphones clamped over his ears and blasting instrumental postrock stuff that he’s taken a liking to. He draws ceaselessly, tearing out pages from his sketchbook and leaving small, white squares of paper all over the floor. Stray bits from the binding get absolutely everywhere. Ray joins him in the back once they rip everything out and put the studio in, spending his time sifting through music programs and recording bare bones songs with Gerard. 

“Don’t make me defend your asses against a sophomore slump,” Brian had warned with a stupid grin as a joke, and then he’d moved on to other things, but the way Gerard’s smile had snapped away like a rubber band made it obvious that it would be the same process all over again. Practically killing themselves over an album and getting knee-deep in promoting it. 

They’ve already written a few tracks and slapped them together with GarageBand – “Fucking  _awesome_ ,” Craig had said, and Frank had wanted to laugh – and god, everything is so much more subdued than last year. Frank feels like they’ve done most of their growing up just within that time span. 

“We’re fucking responsible and stuff now,” Frank says out loud. He slumps back against the couch and listens to whatever’s going on outside in the parking lot that involves yelling and heavy footsteps. Probably drunken kickball.

Ray snorts as he clicks something with the mouse. “I guess. Well, you still break a lot of shit.”

“Not responsible like that.” Frank doesn’t think he’ll ever be responsible like that. “You know what I mean,” he waves it off.

“Yeah, I do. I think it’s good for us, though.”

“Me too.”

There are hollow footsteps as someone steps up into the bus; Gerard emerges from the hallway, sticking his head in to say hello. Frank gets up immediately. 

“How was the meeting?” he asks. 

“Good. Fine.” A flicker of a smile passes over Gerard’s mouth. “Sort of bullshit, but mostly fine. At least it’s not a bunch of people I don’t know.”

“That’s good, man,” Ray says. “Do they give you donuts and stuff?”

“They do give us donuts,” Gerard confirms, rolling his eyes a little. Ray smirks and turns back to his program. When Gerard turns and walks out to the kitchen, Frank follows. The counter is a mess of coffee filters and Gerard is picking one out when Frank touches his back. 

“Hey,” Gerard greets, flicking his gaze up quickly. 

“Hey.” Frank looks back to make sure Ray is out of sight, and then he turns around to give Gerard a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth. “Sorry, I’m totally going to mother you right now and you’re going to hate me, but - it was really okay?”

Gerard presses his lips inward to suppress a smile. “Yeah, it was fine. I still get the cravings and stuff, so. It’s going to help, I think.” 

“Good.” Frank rubs Gerard’s back a little. He cranes his neck to check on Ray again. 

Gerard catches this. “Oh, so now you don’t want anyone to see? Never mind the whole kissing me onstage in front of thousands of people thing.”

“Hey, I’ve pretty much been kissing you since the beginning. I’m only keeping things normal. You’re the one who started rubbing up on me like we’re in a dark alley somewhere.” Frank flashes him a dangerous smile.

“You’re such a fucking exhibitionist,” Gerard laughs out.

“I just like fucking with people’s heads. No one ever trusts what they see.” This makes Frank think of something that Ray had said a long time ago – objectively, it hasn’t been that long but it feels like fucking decades. He stumbles over the sentence, trying to decide whether or not it’s even worth bringing up when Gerard won’t know what he’s talking about, but he giggles it out anyway: “Like. Like when Ray said that you having a girlfriend was the first sign of you being gay.”

“What the fuck?” Gerard looks confused.

“Eh, never mind.” He leans forward and gives Gerard another kiss. 

Gerard’s mouth twitches. “Stop it,” he murmurs quietly, concentrating on dumping out the old coffee grounds and shoving in the new filter. 

“I’m trying to help,” Frank shrugs nonchalantly. He drops his hand and starts to move away, but Gerard hooks his fingers over the waistband of Frank’s pants and pulls so that Frank stumbles toward him. He kisses Frank deeply, then shoves him back with the same hand. 

“Now would you let me have my fucking coffee?” Gerard asks in fake exasperation. 

“Fine by me.” Frank raises his hands in surrender as he backs up a few steps. There’s a stupid giddy feeling taking over his limbs. He jumps into Bob’s bunk and messes up the sheets to distract himself from it.

 

*

  
Frank fucks like he plays - hard, aggressive, reckless, and no sense for safety. The first time they’d done it, he’d woken up with bruises in the strangest places: the corner of his wrist, the inside of his knee, and on his side, three ribs up from the bottom. Gerard had had a tiny line of burst vessels near his collarbone.

“How’d that happen?” Frank had asked with a frown. Gerard had grinned wide. 

“No idea, but whatever it was, I think it should happen again. ASAP.” 

“ASAP,” Frank had agreed.

ASAP turns out to be a singular bathroom at the southeast end of an amphitheater, far enough away from all the stages that only a handful of people were around, but close enough that the music covers up most of the noise. Frank mentally crosses out ‘bathroom: single occupancy’ from his list – but ‘bathroom: stall’ remains.

“This is so shady,” Gerard mutters. He turns the lock anyway and then promptly proceeds to push Frank against the wall next to the sink and press a palm to his dick. 

“Jesus, you’re just going for it, aren’t you,” Frank chokes out. 

“Didn’t they do a study? That,” Gerard tries to take off Frank’s belt while grinding their hips together at the same time, “people in their mid to late,” the buckle slips free, “twenties have heightened,” he unbuttons the pants and gives Frank a hot, messy kiss against his chin, “sex drives?”

“I’m – what? God, you are the worst multi-tasker ever.” Frank’s pants drop around his knees and Gerard starts to follow the motion, but Frank tugs him back up by the collar, saying, “Wait, wait.” And he kisses him as dirtily as possible, all tongue and teeth. 

“Oh, fuck,” Gerard groans when Frank ducks his head lower to bite at Gerard’s neck once before straightening up with a bright smile.

“Okay. Now you’re free to roam the lands.”

Gerard says, “You creep me out sometimes.” But he goes down, settling his knees on Frank’s shoes instead of the bathroom floor. Frank is about to protest for the sake of his toes when Gerard puts his mouth on him, slow and steady, almost all the way before coming up and licking his way back down. Frank’s pretty much reduced to vowels and heavy breathing at this point. He closes his eyes and presses his skull against the wall; Gerard lets him fuck his mouth a little near the end, before pulling off just as Frank comes. 

“I feel offended and rejected,” he slurs out afterwards. His head feels hazy. He doesn’t actually care.

“I have to sing. You think that’s good for my throat?” Gerard stands up and leans into him, tilting his head to mouth at Frank’s adam’s apple before nipping at it quickly. Gerard was a biter, who would’ve thought.

Frank takes a few more breaths to calm down, then undoes Gerard’s pants, pushes away the fabric. Gerard holds his wrist there.

“Stop,” he breathes. “Use - hands.” 

It’s a little dry, but. Frank turns them in a semi-circle so that Gerard is the one against the wall now. He moves his hand on Gerard’s cock, alternating hard presses of pressure between each individual finger and then switching it up. Gerard is fucking noisy as hell, hands clenched in the tails of Frank’s shirt. Frank tucks his face into Gerard’s neck, mouth open, breathing wetly against the staccato beat of Gerard’s pulse as he speeds up. He pushes his shoulders mindlessly against Gerard’s, effectively pinning him, enjoying this almost as much as he’d enjoyed Gerard going down on him. ‘Almost’ being the operative word. 

Gerard makes this high, keening noise, probably without thinking; his eyes are still closed anyway, and he keeps breathing shallowly until Frank feels his body stiffen as he comes into Frank’s hand. 

“Christ,” Gerard mutters. He rests his forehead against Frank’s collarbone. Frank presses a quick kiss on his hair. 

“Clean yourself up, you hussy,” he says as he pulls up his pants. He washes his hands and wipes away smudges of makeup with wet fingers, generally trying to make it look like he didn’t get blown in a public bathroom. 

“It’s fucking hot,” Gerard complains. 

“Nobody told you to have sex with a flak jacket on,” Frank tells him. 

“Okay, no, but I bet you liked it.”

Franks grins at the mirror. “Yeah, maybe.” 

 

*  
 _  
_

 _  
_

> _No band strains? No episode of ‘Behind the Music’ in the making?_

> Oh god, I hope not. Of course there are days where everyone snaps at each other, or we all put on headphones and tune everything else out until we have to play, but I think that’s normal and much healthier than pretending everything’s okay and holding it all in. 

> _It’s pretty amazing that you’re all still getting along so well after all your time on the road._

> No, yeah. It totally is. Like, it’s more the petty stuff that gets on people’s nerves. Someone’s not picking up after themselves in the lounge, or leaving coffee grounds in the filter. I don’t even know. We’re sick of seeing each other all day every day, but when it’s time for a break, all we do is call each other up and talk about our respective days or go catch a movie or something. It’s kind of sad, to think that we have no other friends but ourselves.   
> 

  


*

All five of them are gathered in the lounge of the bus, with Frank and Gerard on the couch and the rest milling around on their feet. It would be hilarious if Frank wasn’t sort of scared and embarrassed about the whole thing.

“Can you not make it feel like we’re being sentenced to death here?” Gerard finally says. 

“I’m fine with it,” Ray says quickly. He rubs his arm. “You know I’m fine with it, come on. It’s just that. I don’t know, what if you guys have a fight or something? I don’t know.”

“Well,” Frank tries to be diplomatic, “I think it’ll be the same as if any of us had a fight. We’d get over it, focus on the band and the music.”

“I’m fine with it, in case that wasn’t clear,” Ray says awkwardly. He crosses his arms over his chest and looks at the floor. 

Gerard wipes a hand over his face and tugs at his hair. “Look, we know it’s our problem if we fuck things up. It’s not like we’re going to project them onto you guys as soon as something happens.”

“We’ve all been doing this for how many years,” Frank adds. “I know how it works. We know how it works – what works and what doesn’t. We all know. I’m not going to start ignoring all that because this one thing has changed.”

“Mikey’s mad,” Gerard points out suddenly. 

Mikey looks up at the ceiling in exasperation. “I’m not mad. Stop trying to swing the focus around to me.”

“I’m just saying.”

Frank looks between the two of them. Gerard had actually pulled Mikey aside a few hours before this band meeting to tell him in person, one-on-one. A fucking band meeting – part of Frank is utterly pissed off that they had to pull this shit like they were all complete strangers. Better to be safe than sorry, he supposed. There was always a blurry and constantly changing line between when they should treat each other like friends and family and when they should do it like a band. It was confusing as fuck. Frank never quite got the hang of it. 

Gerard’s worrying at his lower lip, still staring Mikey down. “You want to – ”

“How long? Has it been going on,” Mikey cuts in. 

Gerard looks at Frank. “A few months,” Frank supplies slowly. (Six months and four days.) No one reacts to it, though. “I think we - we wanted to make sure it wasn’t some stupid  _thing_  that would dissolve as soon as we told anyone. You get that, right?”

Ray nods, still gazing across the room at nothing in particular. He’s frowning slightly.

“Okay, if everyone’s going to be fucking pissed and weird about it, it’s sort of stupid – ” Frank starts.

“No one’s pissed, Frank. Honestly. And it’s not weird, it’s just taking a little bit to absorb, is all.” Ray suddenly looks over at Bob, who’s tossing a water bottle back and forth between his hands. “Bob?”

Bob looks over at them with a startled expression. 

“Do you have any, you know,” Ray gestures with his hands. 

Bob shakes his head. “No, not really. It’s not a huge deal. I’m, you know, it’s cool.”

Frank pushes down the urge to laugh. There’s an uncomfortable silence that settles over the bus. Gerard sighs almost imperceptibly, clenching and unclenching his hand into a fist, obviously craving a substance or two. Ray’s nodding to himself, Mikey’s staring off at nothing, and Bob is wiggling the water bottle by its cap. It’s like they’re sitting around, contemplating a song title or something – Frank doesn’t know if this is good or bad.

“You seem happier,” Mikey says to Gerard eventually, as if no one else is in the room. He glances up at Frank. Frank looks back steadily until Mikey breaks it. Not angrily, not visibly angrily anyway, but not an outpouring of happiness, either. Then again, Frank hadn’t really ever seen that from Mikey. 

“So, okay,” Ray says slowly. “I guess that’s that. I’m glad you uh, decided to say something. And I really am happy for you guys.” He breaks into a smile, a goofy one that seems as genuine as ever. “Actually, I was actually expecting this conversation a lot sooner, you know.”

“Bullshit,” Frank calls, finally allowing himself to relax against the back of the couch. He rubs his shoulders against it, trying to get rid of all the tension packed into the muscles.

Bob leans forward and says, “He’s right. I don’t even believe it because it’s too obvious. It would be too easy. You need to try harder, Iero.” He manages to catch the pillow that Frank throws at him and toss it back about twice as fast. Frank turns to the side, giggling with his forearm raised up near his head as a shield. 

Gerard isn’t paying attention, he’s just silently communicating with Mikey until the corner of Mikey’s mouth lifts up slightly. He shrugs and gets up to give Gerard a half-hearted hug, loose limbed and patting rather than holding, but he’s smiling all the same. 

They all hug each other then, even Bob. “Let’s go get some pizza,” Bob says loudly afterward. 

“Jesus, don’t do that.” Frank rolls his eyes, but he’s sort of glad at the same time. Fucking Bob.

Bob blinks at him. “Do what? I really want some pizza.” And then everyone files out except Frank and Gerard. 

“Weirdest. Fucking. Situation. Ever.” Frank says each word with maximum enunciation as soon as the bus empties out. It’s strangely empty in their wake, especially considering that there were only three of them.

Gerard sighs, exhaling like he’s been holding his breath. “Yeah. Yeah, that was sort of really ridiculous.”

“We were on a Dr. Phil show,” says Frank. It still feels surreal.

“More like Maury.” Gerard glances out to the bunks. “I think he’s mad I didn’t tell him sooner,” he adds softly. 

“He’ll get over it,” Frank reassures. He’s not writing it off or anything; it’s just that he really does know Mikey will get over it.

“I know.” Gerard turns back and takes Frank’s hand in his own, holding it with a slack grip. “So this is really happening now, huh.” He smiles, eyes bright. Frank’s chest suddenly feels full, pressing into his lungs and making him take an extra breath.

“You don’t get to back out on me now. Especially after going through that.” And Frank tightens his fingers more securely around Gerard’s palm.

 

*

  
Mikey comes to him later, cornering him against the bunks mostly because Frank lets him. 

“Listen,” Mikey begins. “I don’t think either of us want me to give you a talk or anything – ”

“Oh god no, don’t give me the talk,” Frank agrees in a rush. 

“I wasn’t going to.” And then, as an afterthought, “Asshole.”

“Anyway,” he continues. “I just.”

Frank waits. He watches Mikey look everywhere but at him. 

“I don’t even know,” Mikey finally admits. “I just felt like I had to talk to you alone. About what, I have no idea, but I figured it would come to me once we were here.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. 

“Apparently not?” Frank guesses. 

“Nah. Maybe it’s a gift that only firstborns get.” Mikey quirks up the corners of his lips. “But it’s making me feel better.”

Frank stays silent. Then he says, carefully, “This isn’t a stupid - we’re not fucking around, you know. I’m sure he told you that, but.”

“Yeah. I know.” Mikey hovers for a moment more and firmly says, “Don’t fuck it up, okay?” He touches Frank’s shoulder briefly before turning to make his way out of the bus. 

Frank slumps against the bunks. “Jesus,” Gerard’s voice comes into his ear, slightly muffled by the curtain between them. It makes Frank jump. He yanks open the curtain and Gerard is already staring at him. 

“Were you in there this entire time?”

“It’s not like I could have casually come out in the middle of the conversation,” Gerard says. “That was fucking strange as hell to listen to.” He rolls out of the bunk and his shirt gets twisted around in the process, hitching up and exposing his hip. 

“You’re acting like I wasn’t right here,” Frank says. He won’t ever admit it, but that was probably the only time that Mikey had actually intimidated him. “Today officially ranks in the top five most loaded days ever.”

“You know who’s not here,” Gerard says loftily, ignoring the last part of what Frank had said, “is the rest of the guys.” He sounds innocent, which is amazing in and of itself, considering what he’s insinuating but mostly considering all they’ve been through – all he’s been through. But that’s not what Frank focuses on; what he does focus on is Gerard’s smile, the one with his bottom lip curled between his teeth. 

They adjourn to the back lounge again. 

“Ow, shit.” Gerard winces and rubs the spot where the TV remote had fallen onto his forehead after Frank had accidentally kicked the cabinet.

“Don't be a baby,” Frank pants. He rolls them over so that he has a knee wedged between Gerard's thighs. His jeans are beginning to stick to his legs as a thin sheen of sweat slowly forms, resulting in frustratingly little give as the material pulls at his skin. It's uncomfortable, but way worth it when he grinds his leg up and Gerard's eyes flutter a little, and  _Christ,_  Frank thinks; no matter how much Gerard's appearance might have changed, he's always had those fucking eyelashes that are still now moving restlessly. He watches as they throw tiny, unwieldy shadows over his cheeks, and how the pink of his bottom lip disappears into his mouth and reappears a split second later - 

“Fuck,” Frank mutters. He shoves a forearm next to Gerard's ear for support and kisses him. Gerard reciprocates just as fiercely, blindly reaching up by his head to grab Frank's wrist in a tight grip. Frank finally moves his knee out of the way and lets his full body weight press down determinedly against Gerard, hipbones to hipbones. 

“Holy shit,” Gerard chokes out. He hooks one sock-clad ankle over the back of Frank's calf and lifts up. Frank hooks two of his fingers – still stained pink from dyeing the crown of Gerard’s hair – over Gerard’s bottom front teeth, not even flinching when Gerard bites down on them.

They end up just dry humping the shit out of each other, like teenagers in a bedroom with their parents downstairs. Which, yeah, is a pretty accurate description of what it’s like to get some on a bus that has at least two people on it twenty-three hours of the day. It’s worth it though, if only for that tiny noise Gerard makes when he comes – half-gasp, half-weird-squeaky-thing, and Frank would laugh if he didn’t find it unbelievably hot.

He stays there, draped over Gerard’s torso, even after moving against each other has given way to slow breaths and a hammering pulse against Frank’s ear as he lays his head over Gerard’s chest. His mind is idly scrolling through snatches of memories he has stored away in the corners of consciousness – mostly of stupid moments that for some reason implanted themselves into Frank’s head, and all of them of Gerard. Nights in the van, days spent recording, the first time he made Gerard laugh and was able to reach out and touch the crinkles of his eyes as if it was the only thing to do. All the dumb shit they did, how they stumbled and groped their way through everything between that first chord Frank had played as a member of the band and right now, lying here, closer than he ever thought they would be. 

He shuts his eyes tightly, thinking,  _Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m going to -_

“So I kind of love you,” Frank says recklessly. He winces at the sound of his voice. Gerard’s heart beats on, with no change in pace or rhythm, but there’s a tiny shift in the movements of his chest when he breathes. There’s hardly a pause though, before he speaks.

“I kind of love you, too.” He says it against the top of Frank’s head, breathing soft against the hair. “Frank. I love you, too.”

Frank turns his head, resting his chin on Gerard’s sternum and looking up. “Yeah, you better.” He smiles goofily and prepares himself for some kind of physically violent reaction, but Gerard just keeps his eyes on Frank and smiles back.   



	3. and return from the ashes you call

**and return from the ashes you call**   
  
  
“You should be homeless all the time,” Frank declares. He toes off his shoes over the edge of the bed and lets them fall to the floor carelessly.   
  
“Nothing here is mine. I can’t like, blow shit up if I wanted to.” Gerard’s voice is accompanied by a slight echo off the bathroom tiles. “Not that I was really into that kinda stuff. It was mostly Mikey.”   
  
Frank pillows his hands behind his head and stares out the window, into the clogged streets of New York City. “How is he?” he asks after a pause. Gerard’s been worried about Mikey for a while, Frank knows that much. When there’s no answer, he turns his head to make sure Gerard’s still in the bathroom. The light’s still on anyway, leaking out onto the carpet.    
  
“He’s okay,” Gerard finally replies. “He sounded mostly okay when I called him yesterday just before you got here. Hungover, but okay.”   
  
Speaking of. “Did you find a meeting place yet?” he asks as Gerard turns off the bathroom light and jumps onto the bed next to Frank, turning over immediately so that he’s on his stomach. This is exactly how they sleep – Frank feels like taking a nap now.    
  
“Yeah. There’s a church a couple blocks from here that has them on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”   
  
“A couple city blocks? You’re going to need, what, like three cigarette breaks?”    
  
Gerard scratches his nose first and backhands Frank’s arm second. When Frank’s phone rings and vibrates at the same time, spinning itself in a slow circle on top of the TV, neither of them moves. It stops after eight rings – but Gerard’s phone starts doing the same thing, this time on the nightstand right next to Frank’s head.    
  
Frank grabs it and answers with, “I thought this was supposed to be a break.”   
  
“It is a break, you’re not doing anything productive, are you?” Brian sounds amused.   
  
“You’re completely ruining all my plans of becoming a hermit, you know,” Frank says. “Or a falconer. I’m going to move to the forest and become a falconer. Eat squirrels and stuff.”   
  
“Yeah, sure. You can’t even cook Cup-o-Noodles. Remember that time you put cold water in and you were waiting for it to steep for like ten minutes – ”   
  
“I’m hanging up now,” Frank interrupts. “You’re stressing me out, making fun of my cookery skills.”   
  
“Okay, okay,” Brian laughs. “Listen though, someone has to check in with me later. We’re booking studio time right now, I have to have exact dates on when this hermitage of yours is going to end.”   
  
“Fine, Mom. Bye.”   
  
“What’d he say,” Gerard asks. He turns onto his side to face the wall; he doesn’t see Frank put his phone on silent.    
  
“Nothing. To call later.” Frank shimmies over to him, crawling on his elbows until he can hook a chin over a shoulder. “Actually, no. He told me to fuck you for three months straight. Swear to god, he said that.”    
  
Gerard giggles into his pillow. “Really,” Frank continues. “No writing, no recording, no meetings. I was like, ‘Brian! I’m shocked. Shocked and disgusted that you would say such a thing. But alright. I will, if you really want me to.’”    
  
He doesn’t make a move to initiate anything, though. He just brings Gerard’s hand up to his mouth and kisses the backs of his fingers lightly. Gerard peeks up at this, and then rolls over onto his back as Frank moves to make room for him, still holding onto his hand.    
  
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says. “I feel less – displaced.”   
  
“Me too,” Frank replies simply.    
  
“You kidding? I know how much you hate New York.”   
  
“I don’t hate New York,” Frank contradicts. “It’s just that I like Jersey that much more. And I like you best,” he says almost childishly.    
  
“Loser.” Gerard stares up at the ceiling with a slight smile.    
  
“We should stay here,” Frank says suddenly. He curls up on his side, shoving one arm under his cheek and picking at the bedsheets with his free hand. “LA is a complete shitshow. Let’s stay here.”   
  
He can feel Gerard look at him. “Okay,” he agrees. “Let’s.”   
  
Sometimes Frank thinks about how easy it’s become to talk or embellish or confirm things without actually having confirmation. He’d gotten a C in oral communication in high school because he hadn’t been able to give a two-minute speech. Now he finds himself giving five-minute answers to single questions, rambling on and on about who the fuck knows what. But what’s most disturbing is how easy it is to lie – to say whatever without reasoning or thinking of consequences.    
  
Their suitcases are already packed and sitting by the door. They fly out the next day, nonstop to Los Angeles.   
  
  


*

  


> _The Black Parade._
> 
> Yup.
> 
> _I’ve heard some horror stories about what happened while recording this._
> 
> They’re probably all true, too. Yeah, we stayed and recorded at the Paramour house, which is this place in LA but it’s so separated from everything. We had other bands that had stayed there telling us all these terrifying things about the house, but I didn’t really buy it until we actually got there. We all went a little stir crazy, it was the strangest thing.  
> 

  


*

  
  
The car had been stuck in city traffic for almost an hour, but now there’s only clear roads and a continuous climb upward. City sounds drop away and the noises of wind rustling at trees takes over. Frank stares out the window until they get to the house, at which point he opens the door before the car even stops all the way, eager to get a chance to stretch his legs.    
  
Everyone else emerges more slowly. The house looms over them, several stories high and intimidating even in its paint job. Bob says, ”We’re actually in _The Shining_ and none of us know it yet.” He squints up at the house. The rest of the guys do the same. Ray tries to wail the theme to  _The X-Files_  but stops when the melody part is supposed to come in and he becomes conflicted on which part to sing. Frank picks up where he left off, but this time with the _Ghostbusters_  theme song.   
  
It takes them the rest of the day to get settled into the house. The high ceilings and wide open rooms cause every noise they make to echo around several times, despite the fact that it’s fully furnished. The bedrooms are upstairs in a straight hallway, like dorms. Creepy dorms.    
  
“Studio’s nice, though,” Bob says offhandedly, leaning back in the poolside chair.    
  
“Still creepy as shit,” Frank counters.    
  
“Dude, you totally love it. Mr. ‘I Love Zombie Movies’.” Bob flicks a column of ash off his cigarette. “Mr. ‘Honk if You Love Zombie Movies’,” he continues with a smirk.    
  
“You’re fucking stupid,” Frank tells him. “And yeah, those are zombies, zombies are awesome. But ghosts aren’t cool, man. I’m not down with that stuff.”   
  
“It’s just a joke,” Bob says mildly. “I’m sure 80% of those stories were made up to scare us. I mean look at this place, it breeds the fucked up part of your imagination. They planted the seeds for that.”   
  
Frank looks up at the rows and rows of windows. All he says is, “Yeah.”   
  
He can’t shake the feeling though, and walks around aimlessly, exploring every piece of furniture, looking twice at all the mirrors. They order in a late dinner and everyone turns in for the night at 11:30, their last night free of any obligations about the new album. The sounds of running water and electric toothbrushes fade away by midnight but Frank is still wide-awake two hours later, clicking around on stupid things on his laptop and exhausting the list of bookmarked links on his YouTube account.    
  
Once he’s changed his wallpaper for the fifth time, he decides he’s had enough and sneaks into the hallway. Everything is dark save for a flood of light spilling out of the cracks of the second doorframe down from his. When he opens the door, he sees Gerard quickly swing his head toward the noise. He’s sitting by the open window, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, a cigarette burning away between his fingers. All five of them had agreed to quit or at least cut down.   
  
“You caught me.” Gerard spreads his fingers out in mock surrender.   
  
Frank closes the door softly behind him and crawls onto the bed. He scoots back so that he can lean up against the headboard. “Hey, I’m not giving you shit for it,” he says, digging his own pack out of his back pocket and lighting one up. “I’ll blow it toward the window,” he reassures when Gerard raises his eyebrows.    
  
They smoke in a comfortable silence. LA looks amazing from up here, made of soundless lights that flicker and shift with the wind. Gerard’s eyes are slightly glazed over as he stares out at the view; Frank thinks about the bottle of antidepressants in Gerard’s travel bag, which were full as the day he had gotten them the last time Frank had checked. He wonders if they still are.    
  
“This place has got some seriously weird vibes,” he says. It’s preferable to whatever variation of ‘are you okay?’ that he was going to ask.    
  
“Yeah,” Gerard agrees absently. “It’ll be good for the album, though.” He stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill and leaves it there, the end crushed but still standing. “I’m fucking nervous about it,” he says abruptly. He shakes his knee up and down, heel tapping against the carpet in an erratic rhythm.   
  
Frank wipes at his mouth with his free hand. “We’re all nervous about it.”   
  
“Yeah, I know, but. This is the first time writing lyrics just, completely sober, you know? It was so much easier to let myself go back then. To get lost in it.”    
  
“You’ll be fine,” Frank pushes. ‘Fine’ is a good word; it’s a safe word, not too ambitious or whatever. “You’ve already recorded stuff for what, like six songs?”   
  
“Mm hmm.” Gerard gets up and falls onto the bed next to Frank. “This shit’s gotta be epic, though.”   
  
They’ve already talked about it countless times, all of them. The epicness of the album. Frank wouldn’t be surprised if they all punched each other more than once in the process of making the epic record.    
  
“It’s going to be. Trust me, I know these things,” he says.    
  
Gerard snorts, but he lets the conversation go. “You’re sleeping here, right?”   
  
Frank nods and slides under the covers as Gerard gets up to turn off the light. They sleep almost like strangers a lot of the time, with only their hands touching or maybe their ankles hooked over one another, mostly because Gerard fucking thrashes around in his sleep so much that it's unbelievable. Frank had spent the first few months sort of curled up in a ball at the edge of the bed and dealing out a punch or two if he was in the mood. Now he lets Gerard work it out in his sleep, or he might rest a palm on the small of Gerard's back every once in awhile during the night.    
  
But sometimes, like tonight, Frank just locks his arms around him and holds on steady till morning.   
  
  


*

  
Gerard begins to slip away after preproduction ends and recording begins. He starts cutting conversations short, avoids one-on-one time, and holes himself in his room instead. In all honesty, it doesn’t really surprise Frank - he’s been going down that road ever since they had their break. Without the touring and the interviews and the meetings, their lives now revolve around the album, a second album that millions of people are expecting. It’s a fact that Frank thinks about every single moment of every day.    
  
But it’s not just him - they’ve all started to bicker about songs, whether or not to scrap some parts or even whole tracks, and stupid petty shit like the amount of reverb or the inflection of a vocal line. Gerard participates heartily in the discussions about the album, arguing as fiercely as the rest of them, but when it comes to anything else, he seems to withdraw into his shell and be impassive about it all; whenever Frank gives him a questioning glance, Gerard inevitably shakes his head and doesn’t answer.   
  
“I’m not in a good place in my head right now,” he announces one day as he stares at the ceiling. Frank is sitting up beside him, picking at his fingernails.   
_  
You don’t say,_  is what Frank wants to reply with. Instead he nods imperceptibly as if it isn’t the most obvious thing in the world to him.    
  
Gerard rubs at his eyes with sharp, annoyed movements, throwing erratic shadows over his pillow. He looks pale and fatigued; when he’s not feeling well, it shows first on his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Fuck, I don’t know.”   
  
“’I don’t know’ is a fucking cop out.” Frank reaches down and restrains Gerard’s wrists. “Don’t do that.”    
  
Gerard finally makes eye contact. “I was – ” He waves his hand a little, bending it back and forth as best he can while Frank keeps his grip. “I’ve been having these crazy dreams. Really vivid.”    
  
Frank waits patiently, but Gerard veers off into another direction. “And I’ve been watching Mikey. He doesn’t look too good.”   
  
“Have you asked him about it?” Frank has noticed this too. He doesn’t even know where Mikey is more than half the time. The kid doesn’t have a driver’s license, so it’s not like he can sneak out and escape to somewhere far away. Sometimes Frank wonders if they’ll ever be able to appreciate any sort of stability as a whole.   
  
Gerard shrugs. “I feel like – like I would come off as some self-righteous prick trying to encourage him through the hardships or whatever.” His voice has risen into a mocking tone by the end of his sentence but he drops it back to normal. “Like, it’s not my place to bring it up. He’ll come find me when he wants to.” He says it firmly, but still looks worried.   
  
“Honestly, you would not come off as a prick. At all,” Frank stresses. “I know you overanalyze this kind of thing to death, and seriously. He’s your brother. He probably knows you better than anyone, and you know  _him_  better than anyone.”   
  
Gerard effectively ends the conversation by not answering. Frank’s still holding on to his wrists – he finally lets them go, placing them at Gerard’s sides.    
  
“Can you just fucking talk to me? About anything, I don’t care. Don’t do this whole mute thing,” Frank tries as a last ditch effort. He knows it won’t work, but he does it anyway.    
  
And this is the thing that Frank’s been afraid of. Gerard can always reach out if he wants to, he can let people in if he wants to, but he can also shut himself off so completely that even Frank, who’s watched him self-destruct many times over, who’s been there during every single sleepless night, who now knows how control his breathing and his heartbeat with a simple touch; even Frank won’t be able to get through. He can’t badger or coddle or yell or wait – he just _can’t_ , period.   
  
“Gerard,” he sighs. The name sounds raw as he says it, scraping against his throat and tripping out of his mouth. It occurs to him that maybe there was another reason that he’d waited until Gerard had gotten stable and sober before laying his metaphorical guts out on the table – he tells himself that neither of them had been ready, but there’s something more selfish than that: he also probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the way Gerard isolated himself if they had actually been together.    
  
“I’m sorry, I’m trying.” Gerard speaks with his eyes closed, and Frank feels even worse. He wants to be here, but he doesn’t want to be a fucking obligation. Then, the album too. Everything weighs in on his mind, fighting for space and pushing their way to his conscious attention. Not to mention the fact that they hadn’t had sex in weeks, which should have been the least of his worries but had an incredibly annoying way of heightening the frustration that coursed its way through Frank’s blood daily now.   
  
Gerard lays a forearm over his eyes. “Can you get me a glass of water and maybe some aspirin? My head is killing me.” He peeks out, looking apologetic.   
  
“Don’t look at me like that. What else am I here for if not to wait on you night and day, huh?” Frank forces his voice to be light and cheery, but he clears his throat to get rid of the faux emotions as soon as he steps into the hallway. His feet hit the stairs with dull noises, the weight barely enough to even penetrate through the thick wood.    
  
The kitchen is lit yellow by the sun, yet it’s eerie in the stillness of everything. When Frank rounds the corner of the fridge, he sees Mikey with his back to him, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the kitchen island. There’s a concave hunch to his shoulders as his head hangs down; it’s a defeated pose, one that Frank doesn’t want to intrude on. He can’t remember the last time he saw Mikey alone like this.   
  
He cricks his jaw and says, “Hey,” softly, tempering the noise of his voice with the soft click of pulling open the fridge door. Mikey’s head twitches, and then he sort of moves one shoulder back and to the other side so he can peer around it at Frank.    
  
“What’s up. How’s Gerard?”    
  
“He wants to know how you are.” Frank cracks open a bottle of water and takes a swig.   
  
Mikey shrugs a little. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”   
  
“Are you?” Frank retaliates. “You seem kind of down lately.”   
  
“I’m playing okay, aren’t I? If I’m not, you can tell me.”   
  
“This isn’t about your playing, and you know it,” Frank says sharply because, god, there’s only so much he can take. Something in him snaps. “Shit, Mikey. Can you just let someone know if something’s wrong? Yes or no, it can be that simple.”   
  
Mikey straightens up, lolling against the island briefly as he speaks. “Go worry about your fucking boyfriend instead. How about that?” he drawls, pushing off with his hips and leaving the kitchen through the dining room.    
  
Frank stands there holding the bottle in his hand until he remembers what he had come downstairs for in the first place. He sighs, grabs the bottle of aspirin off the counter, and turns to make his way back to Gerard’s room.   
  
Yeah. How about that.   
  
  


*

_  
_

> _How was the writing process this time around?_
> 
> Well, the style of the album is different, obviously, but the process didn’t really change much. We did get really nitpicky with everything because we really wanted it all to be absolutely perfect. There were a couple shouting matches, everyone yelled a lot, but we got through it. It’s pretty hilarious to think about it all in retrospect now.
> 
> _Did the environment affect you guys in any way?_
> 
> Oh god, yeah. Everyone ran with the creepy vibe of the place. There’s a really raw feeling to the album, I think, because we managed to record exactly what we were going through at the time. A lot of pent up shit was flying around.  
> 

  


*

  
  
If he lays it all out, the problem is that he doesn’t know how to handle it, despite it being far from the first time that Gerard has been like this. Same person, same sort of low, but the situation makes all the difference. ‘I love you’ sounds cheap and trite, especially at this juncture; ‘it’ll be okay’ sounds presumptuous and stupid. ‘Snap the fuck out of it’ is what Frank really wants to say but can’t, for obvious reasons.   
  
And the house. The goddamn house is driving him nuts. The fact that it’s almost completely isolated. The fact that it seems to cultivate all the bad shit that’s growing between them. All the angry noises of LA are blocked out; the only signs of an outside world are the In-n-Out bags that Bob had left on the table the night before.    
  
He finally finds Gerard in the living room, slumped on the couch with a notebook on his lap. The page is still empty though, and there isn’t even a pen in sight.   
  
“Hey.” Frank stands in front of him. “How are you?”   
  
It takes Gerard a second to answer. “I’m good.”   
  
“You sure?” Frank presses. Somewhere along the way, he’s learned when to press and when not to. He knows, and yet sometimes he chooses to do the opposite. Like now.   
  
“Yeah.” Gerard sounds annoyed. “Can you just – I need – ”   
  
“You need me to fill in the blanks? Can I just leave you alone, you need some time to yourself,” Frank recites. “Am I right?” All the frustrations about the house and their position are boiling over. He has to physically clench his teeth to keep them at bay.   
  
“Frank, cut it out. You’re being all moody and it’s stupid.”   
  
“I hate it when you do this,” Frank mutters. “I hate it when you do this,” he decides to repeat more loudly, because fuck being passive-aggressive right now.    
  
“Do what,” Gerard says in a flat voice. He’s still sitting down, head resting on the corner of the couch back.    
  
“Keep all your shit to yourself until you have a meltdown. I hear you having nightmares all the time, but you never tell anyone. You shuffle around the house like some Thorazine addict when you think no one’s looking, but you never tell anyone. I know you’re worried about Mikey, but you  _never fucking tell anyone_ ,” Frank finishes. What he really wants to say is ‘you never tell  _me_ ’, but of course he’d never say that out loud.    
  
“Is this what you want? To drive yourself crazy while making an album? Is it really getting to you, the – the pressure, and all that?” he tries.   
  
Gerard laughs, which would usually serve to piss Frank off even more, but it’s Gerard’s tactic during arguments; to laugh, to be dismissive and keep getting the other person angrier until they fuck off on their own and Gerard doesn’t have to tell them to.    
  
“Fuck,” Frank hisses. It’s stupid and juvenile, but he can’t stop himself from kicking a chair. They both watch it slide across the floor before bumping dully against the TV cabinet.   
  
“Oh, okay. What, you’re getting violent now? You wanna punch me?” Gerard asks. His voice lilts up and it’s his interview voice, the fake interest and the upswing at the ends of his sentences.    
  
“Yeah, I want to punch you, because you’re being a huge pussy who won’t deal with his shit. Get Mikey some help, if you think he needs it. Talk to someone if you need it.” Frank is having trouble with controlling his voice. “I couldn’t give less of a shit who you talk to, just fucking do it. Fucking,  _act_ .”   
  
His fist swings out automatically with his final word, but he manages to temper it, to hold back at the last second. Gerard catches his wrist anyway, and squeezes it hard as his eyes flash.   
  
“Don’t,” Gerard bites out. “Do not. Hit me.”   
  
Frank yanks his arm away hard, feeling a little chastened. “I didn’t mean to. And I wasn’t going to. Christ.”   
  
Gerard sits still for moment. Then he quickly rubs a hand over his face and gets up, walking out of the living room. “I can’t do this right now.”   
  
“You can’t do anything, ever,” Frank yells in response. Gerard had pushed back a little but retreated; for some reason, Frank wants it all to spill out, just this once. Gerard turns and walks back into the room, stopping only inches away from Frank.   
  
“Fuck you, Frank, you have  _no_  idea,” he spits. “You have no fucking idea what the hell it feels like, so you need to shut your goddamn mouth. Alright? Because I have no control over it and I don’t know what you want me to do about that. What the  _fuck_  do you want me to do, Frank.” His name comes out sounding dead and wooden.    
  
_I want you to scream_ , Frank can picture himself saying.  _I want you to act like you actually care about this_ . He stares back at Gerard, at the questioning, sarcastic lift of his eyebrows.    
  
“Fine,” he finally says. “Fine, forget it. I’m being a hormonal girl, right? You want me to fuck off, right?” And he leaves without looking back. There’s no noises calling him back, or of any movement at all – he can almost see Gerard standing stock still, and it pisses him off even more.    
  
He slams the front door and paces around the lawn for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. When Ray comes outside, Frank’s sitting on the grass, pulling listlessly at the blades around him. He feels petulant, like a child, but it’s satisfying to revel in it.    
  
“You said.” Ray pauses; he speaks cautiously. “You said it wouldn’t get in the way.”   
  
“It’s not,” Frank snaps.    
  
Ray is quiet for a moment. “I was just checking,” he says. He gets up and Frank thinks he’s going to leave, but he claps a hand on Frank’s shoulder and squeezes. “Did you still want to meet up in the studio after dinner to get through those new chord progressions?”   
  
“Yeah,” he replies, trying not to sound sullen because Ray isn’t to blame for anything. “Yeah, I’ll be there around 8.”   
  
“’kay. I’ll tell Mikey. Maybe he’ll be up for it.” After another pause, Ray heads back inside.   
  
Frank digs a hole into the lawn with the toe of his shoe until the white rubber gets covered with flakes of dirt and dead grass. It’s twilight by now; he slaps at more than a few bugs that get too close before finally deciding to head back inside. The first thing he sees when he crosses the threshold is Gerard sitting on the second to last stair, elbows resting on his knees and hands hanging loosely by his shins.   
  
“Frank,” Gerard starts, looking up at him with a drawn expression, a slightly apologetic pull to his mouth. It’s an in, they both know it.   
  
Frank stares back for a beat, then takes care not to brush against Gerard’s elbows as he climbs up the stairs without saying a word.   
  
  


*

  
Even though he knows he pushed it too far, he doesn’t try to talk to Gerard after that, and Gerard returns the favor. The argument – Frank can’t even remember what they had yelled about – boils down in the absence of speaking until they settle into some sort of cold arrangement, where being in the same room can be withstood until the obligation to be there is lifted. Recording and technical talk is fine; for example, Frank had broken a string the other day and Gerard had pointed to drawer where Ray kept spare ones. It’s fucking stupid, and Bob says as much when he joins Frank for breakfast before they have to go down and record.   
  
“You guys are being fucking stupid.” Bob leans over to grab an orange out of the fruit bowl and settles onto the stool next to Frank.   
  
Frank’s eyes feel raw and bloodshot. There’s a constant ache right behind them. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately, mostly because of the crazy hours that the band has taken to. Everything’s consequently covered in with a dream-like sheen; it’s been like living in some alternate universe. “I’m acting the same as I’ve always acted,” he says in a raspy voice.   
  
“That’s true,” Bob admits. “But only around everyone else. The rest of the time I feel like I’m living with two thirteen year old girls who are mad at each other.”   
  
“Oh, fuck you,” Frank scowls immediately. “Don’t even think about writing this off as something as dumb as that. You don’t even – you weren’t even there when it was really bad. You don’t know what it’s like, how familiar all this shit is.”   
  
“What, I wasn’t there when everyone was partying way too hard and you guys had to recover from that mess? When Gerard was drinking himself into a hole? When no one in the band was even talking to each other and the shows sucked? You’re right, I wasn’t there for that. Sorry, I guess I missed some sort of initiation period.”   
  
Bob rarely brings this up, the fact that he hadn’t been there since the beginning, mostly because it doesn’t factor in at all. It’s weird to hear him talk about it outright, and Frank is effectively jarred out of a comeback.    
  
“God, what the hell are you trying to do,” he mutters instead.   
  
“I’m just saying,” Bob continues a little harshly. “He needs you there. You keep saying that this is what it was like before. Well, this is your chance to do something about it and not dance around the issue for another two years.”   
  
“You think I don’t know that? I’ve fucking tried, believe me. I’m not going to wait around for him if he refuses to grow some balls and do anything about it. And since when did you get so invested in what we did?”   
  
“Since you decided to tell us what was going on between you two. Don’t be an asshole, man.” Bob digs his thumb into the orange with a decisive movement. Droplets spray out all over the counter.   
  
Frank cards his fingers through his hair and squeezes his eyes shut until he sees spots. “You know what it is? It’s this fucking house.” He is prepared for Bob telling him to shut the fuck up and stop blaming their problems on an inanimate object, but he silently keeps peeling at the orange instead, creating a messy pile of skins.   
  
He eventually sighs. “He doesn’t want to listen to anyone else. Except maybe Mikey, but Mikey is – ” He stops talking and just turns the orange around and around in his hand. “He’s, I don’t even know. Fuck.”   
  
“Pretty much.” Frank drops his hands to the counter, palms up. He stares at the lines that divide his fingers, then closes them into fists. Bob’s waiting for him, he realizes, and there’s a sudden rush of gratitude for him sticking around.   
  
“I don’t know what to do,” Frank states hollowly.    
  
“Neither does he.” Bob starts in on the orange again, working his thumb into the middle until the whole thing splits apart. “Neither do any of us.”   
  
“But we figure it out,” Frank guesses with a slightly sarcastic lilt. Bob smiles to himself, a barely there curl to his mouth.    
  
“What else are you going to do with a band full of fuck ups?”    
  
Frank laughs a little – it fades away quickly, and he rests his chin in his arms. He blinks when Bob says, “Gerard’s been talking to Mikey lately, though.”   
  
“Yeah?” Frank swallows against the tickle in his throat.    
  
“Yeah. Lots of closed door conversations.” Bob shrugs, but Frank knows he didn’t throw that information out there for the hell of it. “Hopefully they’re talking it out.”   
  
“Hopefully,” Frank echoes.   
  
“It’s a step, right?”   
  
“Mm hmm.” It’s somehow a soothing noise to make, and so he says it again.    
  
  


*

_  
_

> _I understand there were some issues concerning Mikey._
> 
> [ _Pause_ ] There were, I guess you could call them issues, yeah. He’s talked about them before, I’m sure you’ve heard. All of us were having problems, but his condition is what made it worse for him. He sought help though, which is really the only part that matters, and he’s been really great through everything.   
> 

  


*

  
Frank sees the cab pull up to the front of the house from his room window. Its yellow roof and triangular advertisement stare up at him for a few seconds before he walks downstairs. There are bags in the hallway standing in a neat arrangement, all the edges parallel to each other. He, Ray, and Bob had helped pack them last night, folding and refolding clothes in an effort to prolong the process, just so they would have something to occupy their hands for the time being. Gerard had taken Mikey into the bathroom; they’d talked in low voices with long, heavy pauses in between.    
  
“Did you have any idea how much he’d been drinking?” Ray had murmured to Frank with several confused lines creased into his forehead. Frank had wordlessly shaken his head in response. And apparently the drinking had been paired with antidepressants, too. He’s aware that no one actually knows someone inside and out, but it still doesn’t take away from the plain shock of it all. Part of him feels convinced that they’ve made a mistake, that there isn’t anything wrong and someone’s just pulling one over on them. The cab and the bags tell a different story.   
  
His feet stall on the last step as his hand curls tightly around the banister. The front door is already open, letting in a sharp, acute angle of light, and he hears the undertones of Bob’s voice coming from outside. The doorway bobs in front of him when he finally steps down and grabs a few of the bags. The sun is almost unbearably bright in his eyes as he lugs them out to the cab, where Bob is talking on the phone and Ray is gesturing to the driver.    
  
Bob lifts his chin away from the mouthpiece and says, “Don’t hurt yourself,” but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He talks for a few more seconds, then hangs up as Mikey emerges from the house with Gerard walking right beside him, a hand splayed over the middle of Mikey’s back.    
  
“That was Stacy,” Bob informs. “She’s waiting for you at her house.” He grabs a bag and so does Frank; they stuff them into the trunk as Ray opens the car door and Gerard says something to Mikey, Then they all stand around awkwardly in the absence of anything to do, shuffling their feet, hands stuffed into their pockets.    
  
“You’re going to see me the day after tomorrow, you guys know that, right? I’m not being shipped off to another country or anything.” Mikey sounds amused and weary at the same time, but it’s plain that he’s relieved to be leaving, if only for two days.    
  
Frank pulls Mikey into a hug anyway. Mikey thumps a fist against Frank’s back a few times. “Sorry for being a huge asshole,” he mumbles.    
  
“Shut the fuck up,” Frank tells him. “I was the asshole.”   
  
“Yeah, well.” Mikey laughs wryly. Frank transfers him over to Gerard, who clutches at him tight and says, “Call me when you get there.”   
  
Mikey raises his eyebrows at Bob and Ray as he ducks into the cab. “See you later,” he says through the open window.   
  
Bob leans down, resting his forearms over the door. “I’ll save the hugs for when you really need them. You know I only give out three a year.” But he reaches in to wrap a hand around the back of Mikey’s head and gently presses their foreheads together for a few seconds before moving away. Ray smiles blankly and accepts a clumsy half-hug when Mikey snakes one arm out and loops it around his neck.    
  
The cab shifts into drive as soon as Ray steps away. “Call me,” Gerard says again loudly. They watch until the car circles around the driveway and disappears on the downhill slope.    
  
Bob lights up a cigarette. “Rob wants us in the studio in half an hour,” he announces dully.   
  
“Brian wanted someone to call him.” Frank rubs his chin with a palm. He tries to remember the last time he’d shaved, just for the sake of having something to think about.   
  
“I’ll do it,” Ray offers. He steps away, flipping out his cell phone from his pocket and shading the screen with his other hand as he scrolls through numbers. Gerard is still gazing out where the car had been. Frank almost says something, but instead he wraps a soft grip around Gerard’s wrist for a brief moment before heading back into the house.    
  
For some reason, he expects the house to feel different, but nothing’s changed except for the fact that the door to Mikey’s room is closed. Even his bass is still sitting in the studio alongside all the other instruments. Frank goes up to his room and sits on the bed, swinging his feet a little but only once. The knock on the door comes right as he’s telling himself he was stupid for hoping there would be one. He gets up and opens it with a steady motion.   
  
“I,” Gerard begins, and then Frank takes his hand and pulls him all the way into the room. Gerard comes willingly; he encircles his arms around Frank’s waist. “Christ, I’m fucking worried,” he breathes into Frank’s shoulder. “I didn’t know how bad it was. He doesn’t like to let people know about that kind of thing, you know? Christ,” he says again. Frank feels him shake his head.   
  
“It’s good that you talked to him.” Frank cradles the back of Gerard’s head with one hand and molds the other around a shoulderblade, reacquainting himself to the shapes under his fingertips. “It’s going to get better.”   
  
“I know,” Gerard sighs. “I know, but I can’t fucking help the worrying. I just wish I’d seen it sooner.”   
  
“All that matters is that he’s getting help now,” Frank says firmly. “It wouldn’t’ve mattered when you saw it if he didn’t want to talk about it. Or if he wasn’t ready to.” He lifts up onto his tiptoes and presses a calm kiss to Gerard’s forehead. When he feels Gerard finally relax into his grip, he smiles faintly. “Does that sound familiar?”   
  
Gerard snorts a little. “A bit.”   
  
Frank kisses him again, this time on the cheek. Then lower on the jawline. He deliberately stays away from Gerard’s mouth. “I’m sorry for being a complete bastard.”    
  
“No, no. It was – ” Gerard visibly changes his mind about whatever he was going to say. “I’m sorry too.”   
  
Frank doesn’t pry. “Bob said we were being stupid.”   
  
“Bob would.” Gerard grins lopsidedly.   
  
Frank finally lets go and steps away; Gerard holds on to the ghost of Frank’s form for a split second longer before dropping his arms to his sides.   
  
“Go wait for Mikey to call,” Frank motions with his chin in the direction of Gerard’s room, “and I’ll meet you down in the studio.”   
  
“Okay,” Gerard agrees. But he merely stands there. “Okay,” he repeats, and this time he does walk away. Frank keeps his eyes on the empty doorway, then opens his mouth and runs a hand over it as he exhales audibly. He presses until he can feel the bite of teeth against his lips.   
  
Light guitar strums and the tinny machine-gun fire of a snare drum bring his attention back. Half an hour. Rob. Studio. Recording.    
  
By the time he makes it down to the basement, he’s ready to write.   
  
  
  
Gerard comes to his room that night. Frank opens his eyes as Gerard is peeling the covers back, flashes of his limbs becoming illuminated by the moonlight peeking through the blinds. The bed rustles and shifts as Frank waits patiently for Gerard to get comfortable.    
  
There’s a pause as everything becomes still again, and then, without even double-checking to see if Frank is awake or not, Gerard begins softly: “I’ve been having these nightmares.”   
  
And Frank listens.   
  
  


*

  
Although they’d moved a couple weeks ago, being out of that house was still a relief. Frank had never appreciated waiting in lines or pushing through crowds more than he did nowadays. He and Gerard were living in a temporary apartment not far from Bob and Patrick’s place; Mikey was staying with Alicia, still seeing people and now getting treatment for a diagnosed condition. Frank had finally stopped checking in on him after he’d texted  _what are you doing_  at 3:00 in the morning a few days ago and gotten the response  _i jus had sex upside down. stop txting me_ . Gerard was still calling everyday and visiting as much as possible without getting annoying, but for the first time in awhile, things were on a general upswing.    
  
Promotion for the album – another new thing - is supposed to begin next week, including press conferences and junkets. None of that really affects him much, but the prospect of playing to people again makes him antsy and anxious in a good way. New songs, new stageshows. He’s been practicing everyday, holed up somewhere in the apartment and playing scales when they’re not rehearsing as a whole.   
  
“I’m ready to fucking do this,” he’d said to Ray, who had rolled his eyes, laughed, and said, “Yeah Frank, I know.”   
  
So Frank is hunched over his guitar, idly fingerpicking the strings while watching some show about lions on the Discovery Channel when the front door opens and Gerard walks in.   
  
“Hey,” Frank calls without looking away from the TV.   
  
“Didja eat lunch yet?” There’s a  _whump_  as Gerard drops his jacket on the dining table and walks into the kitchen to rattle through cupboards.   
  
“Half a sandwich.”   
  
Gerard reappears by the couch empty-handed, apparently having failed to find anything edible. “Did you want to get take out – ” Frank stops talking as soon as he looks up.   
  
Gerard grins at him.   
  
”I - it’s white,” is all Frank says. He lays his guitar down on the carpet and says, “It’s white,” again.   
  
“I know,” Gerard crows, running a palm over it as he ducks down to check his reflection in the window. “What do you think?” he asks, turning back to Frank.    
  
Frank tilts his head as if doing so will help him examine the new color on Gerard. “Looks good,” he finally decides. He chews his lip in mock worry. “But man, I’m not really looking forward to thinking I’m being fucked by an eighty year old, you know?”   
  
He doesn’t think Gerard will tackle him. They’re past that point now – more mature in some ways, however laughable that idea is. But he does, pinning Frank down against the couch and succeeding mostly because Frank is too startled to do anything but submit to it.    
  
“Who’s eighty, huh? Who’s eighty?” Gerard is saying, ducking down so that he’s up in Frank’s face as Frank laughs and moves his head from side to side.    
  
Frank finally yelps, “No one’s eighty! No one! Jesus.”    
  
“That’s right,” Gerard says in satisfaction. He doesn’t make a move to get off, though, only lifting his torso up enough so that Frank can further examine this change in appearance. He reaches up to straighten out the collar of Gerard’s shirt, re-creasing it and making sure it sits correctly.   
  
“You still surprise me sometimes,” he says, fingers resting against the nape of Gerard’s neck. He’s not talking about the hair.   
  
Gerard gives him a crooked smile. “I’m glad.” He splays his hand directly over Frank’s sternum. His pallor has been improving – he looks healthy, maybe even happy. Frank wraps both hands around Gerard’s wrist and brings it up to blow raspberries onto his fingertips.   
  
“You’re such an immature little shit,” Gerard says; he bites his lip when Frank’s tongue meets skin.   
  
They fall into bed later, stripping clothes and moving quickly in coordinated steps, as if they’re still on the bus and trying to keep things a secret. Gerard is urgent, licking at the tattoo on Frank’s neck and rubbing that certain spot on the back of his thigh, but Frank is more unhurried and deliberate; he rides Gerard slow, moving ceaselessly on top of him, feeling Gerard’s hands gripping his thighs and squeezing erratically. Frank’s hair hangs low and damp over his face - it gets into his mouth every so often but he just spits it out without ever pausing. He never looks away from Gerard, taking in the newly dyed hair, the long, exposed neck, how his throat moves as he swallows or murmurs, “Fuck,” the way he watches Frank with heavy-lidded eyes.    
  
Frank thinks,  _yes_ . Gerard is still gazing at him unblinkingly.  _This, right here, right now._   
  
  


*

_  
_

> _What’s next for you guys?_
> 
> What’s next? I have no idea. Well, there are still more shows to play through this year. There’s been talk about another album, of course, but honestly, I pretty much really feel like sleeping for about a year straight. Who knows what’ll come after that.  
> 

  


*


	4. i'm the kind of human wreckage that you love

**i'm the kind of human wreckage that you love**   
  
  
  
Transcontinental flights aren’t a big deal anymore. Hotels have insinuated themselves as a part of his life. Buses cutting through states for hours at a time, being filmed for television, coming across his name while surfing the web, people screaming at him as he walks around, lifting his guitar up and hearing thousands of voices singing along, cracking the pain out of his joints and smelling like Sharpie pens all day – this is normal now. What was once novel has been stripped down to routine, because things change. Even when Gerard was insisting to people that they never would, Frank thought differently because really, how could they  _not_ ?   
  
Playing, though - having a guitar strapped against him and pounding at the chords he’s played countless times, sweating out the music and breathing in the noise. He knows he still has, and always will have, that part of himself that will love it unconditionally, no matter where they are – no matter where he is. That despite the bullshit that comes as a package deal with everything else, there’s always a gap in time where it’s just the band and the crowd; just the five of them playing music to some people who happen to like what they hear.   
  
But then there’s this too, as Frank smiles while listening to Gerard complain about having to repeat himself over and over as if it’s not going to be happening for at least six more months. Until the album comes out, anyway, and probably still after that.    
  
“I swear, if I have to say the word ‘concept’ one more time.” Gerard sighs deeply and doesn’t finish the sentence.    
  
Frank says, “I swear, if I have to hear you say the word ‘concept’ one more time.” Gerard smiles with his eyes closed, and Frank adds, “I’m sure that goes for everyone else, too. God, we had to make it a concept album. You had to write about all these metaphors and shit.”   
  
“I wanted to torture you guys by making you listen to me talk nonstop, of course,” Gerard drawls, making his voice more nasally than Frank thought possible.    
  
Frank idly wonders what time it is back in Jersey, and if his parents are awake yet. 9:00am, maybe? Or, no, maybe that was only when they were in Germany. If there was another hour added on -    
  
“You think we’re jaded assholes yet?” Gerard asks halfway into his pillow so that his words are muffled.   
  
Frank thinks about it as honestly as he can. “I think we always were. In a different way, though.”   
  
Gerard hums. “That’s reassuring.” He shifts to face Frank when Frank says, “You know what we are?”   
  
“What.”   
  
“We’re all grown now. Grown men.” Frank makes a tough face to demonstrate this, but it drops off quickly.    
  
“I think we’re mostly tired,” Gerard says. And he  _looks_ tired – a constant downward tug to his mouth, eyelids pale and unmarked. But still, his face hasn’t changed. More than anything, he looks young, barely older than the twenty-four years he’d been when everything had started. Just five kids in a suburb of New Jersey, making noise. Christ, Frank had been in college, sitting in the last row of lecture halls in order to make a quick escape from class. Gerard had still been a hermit in his basement back then.   
  
Worlds away. He giggles at the thought.    
  
“What,” Gerard breathes.    
  
“Nothing.” And then, “You’re thirty.”   
  
Gerard laughs softly. “Yeah, fuck you. I’m thirty.”   
  
“It’s okay. I’m young enough for the both of us.” Frank looks over at Gerard. His hair is starting to grow out, flipping black strands over the pristine pillowcase. “We’re in Sweden.”   
  
“Mm hmm.”   
  
“Just checking.”    
  
Without opening his eyes, Gerard runs a hand over Frank’s arm, down and up and down again, finally settling and curling a loose grip around his elbow.    
  
“Happy birthday again,” Frank says cheekily. He curls the tip of his tongue over his upper front teeth and makes a face.    
  
“Shut up,” Gerard murmurs. Then, “Thanks.”   
  
Gerard’s palm is warm and dry. Frank sleeps.   
  
  


*

_  
_

> _And touring is still great?_
> 
> Yeah. It’s, you know? I - there's nothing like playing onstage to all those kids, to those people. You get a rush - I know that sounds so cheesy, oh god - but I mean, you really do get this, this overly sensitized reaction to everything. And in that moment, it's like, I exist, you know? I  _exist._
> 
> _You exist._
> 
> Yeah. [ _Laughs_ ] Yeah, I exist.  
> 


End file.
